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 was named one of the best books of 2013 by Complex[7] Book Riot,[8] and L Magazine.[9] It was shortlisted for the 2013 Believer Book Award[10] and won the 2014 Bard Fiction Prize, which included a $30,000 cash prize and a semester-long writer-in-residence appointment at Bard College.[11]

Reviews often referred to the book as a novel with zombies that is not a zombie novel,[12][13][14] set in Louisiana and referring opaquely to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.[15][16] It received generally positive reviews from media outlets including The Guardian,[13] Electric Literature,[17] Los Angeles Review of Books,[16] Publishers Weekly,[18] and The Millions.[19]

In 2017, Sims published his second book, a short story collection called White Dialogues, with Two Dollar Radio on September 12, 2017.[20] Carmen Maria Machado called the collection "[o]ne of the most genuinely terrifying, brilliant short story collections of the past decade" in Literary Hub[21] and Hannah Pittard wrote that it "moves readers from one beleaguered mind to another by way of nearly hysterical examination" in The New York Times Book Review.[22] It also received positive reviews from Publishers Weekly,[23] Kirkus Reviews,[24] and Bookforum, in which Tony Tulathimutte called Sims "possibly the smartest and most inventive writer of his (my) generation."[25] 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.[26]

His stories have been published in The Iowa Review,[27] Story,[28] Conjunctions,[29] Ploughshares,[30] and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.[31]

He currently teaches undergraduate fiction courses at the University of Iowa.[32]