Bennett Sims (author)

Sims was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.[1][2] During high school, he spent three summers in the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts' boarding program, where he wrote fiction.[3] He graduated from Pomona College in 2008, where he was mentored by David Foster Wallace.[3] He later graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow,[4] and he served as a Provost's Postgraduate Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa from 2012-2013.[5]

Sims's debut novel, A Questionable Shape, was published by Two Dollar Radio on May 1, 2013.[6] It won the 2014 Bard Fiction Prize, which included a $30,000 cash prize and a semester-long writer-in-residence appointment at Bard College.[7]

Reviews often referred to the book as a novel with zombies that is not a zombie novel,[8][9][10] set in Louisiana and referring opaquely to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.[11][12] It received generally positive reviews from media outlets including The Guardian,[9] Electric Literature,[13] Los Angeles Review of Books,[12] and Publishers Weekly.[14]

In 2017, Sims published his second book, a short story collection called White Dialogues, with Two Dollar Radio on September 12, 2017.[15] It received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly,[16] Kirkus Reviews,[17] and Bookforum.[18] After the publication of the book, Sims was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2018-2019, where he worked on his third book, a novel.[19]

His stories have been published in The Iowa Review,[20] Story,[21] Conjunctions,[22] Ploughshares,[23] and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.[24]

He currently teaches undergraduate fiction courses at the University of Iowa.[25]