Liz Breazeale
Photo by Stephanie Brown Photography
Bio
Liz Breazeale is the recipient of the 2018 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Fiction for her first book, Extinction Events: Stories, published by University of Nebraska Press in 2019. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and BAs in creative writing and literature from Missouri State University. Breazeale lives in Denver, where she works as a technical editor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Her work has been featured in the Best of the Net anthology, and is forthcoming or has appeared in Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Ohio Review, the Collagist, Pleiades, Fence, Fugue, Sycamore Review, Passages North, and others.
It’s difficult to feel like a writer when you have a day job; your vocation is pushed into the margins of your life. Relegated to ungodly hours before the sun rises, to lunch breaks, to gym trips, to commutes, to the empty minutes punctuating your day. I’ve often felt, in the almost five years since I graduated from the MFA, that my progress is so slow I must surely be standing still. Sometimes (often) I’ve felt like an imposter, even though in that five-year span, I’ve published my first book and many other stories and essays in great literary journals.
Receiving this grant is a deep and unique and kind of terrifying honor, one I don’t take lightly. It’s given me a whole new mindset about my next short story collection, a way to place my writing back at the center of my life. It’s going to allow me time to travel, research, and, most of all, to write and exist within my words. Writing will always be the most difficult, incredible, draining, thrilling, infuriating, beautiful thing in the world, but grants like this one make the practicalities, at least, easier to navigate. I can’t express how grateful I am and how much this award has reignited my excitement and passion for this project.