Bennett Sims (author)

For the bishop, see Bennett Sims.

Bennett Sims is an American fiction writer with three book publications, the novel A Questionable Shape (2013) and the short story collections White Dialogues and Other Minds and Other Stories. He is an assistant professor at the University of Iowa.

Bennett Sims
Born	Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S.
Occupation	Writer, novelist
Alma mater	Pomona College Iowa Writers' Workshop

Early life and education

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]

Career

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]

Other Minds and Other Stories was named a finalist for The Story Prize.^[25]

He currently teaches undergraduate fiction courses at the University of Iowa.^[26]