Meg Pokrass

Meg Pokrass is the author of five collections of flash fiction, and an award-winning collection of prose poetry, Cellulose Pajamas, which received the Blue Light Book Award in 2016. Her writing has been widely anthologized, most recently in Best Small Fictions 2018 and 2019, as well as 2 Norton Anthologies of flash fiction: Flash Fiction International and New Micro-Exceptionally Short Fiction, Flash Non-Fiction Funny edited by Dinty Moore (Woodhall Press, 2018), Nothing Short of 100 (Outpost 19, 2018), and her stories have been selected for Wigleaf ‘s Top 50’s list numerous times.

A new full flash fiction collection will be released in the summer of 2019 by Pelekinesis Press. She is the founder of New Flash Fiction Review and co-founder of San Francisco’s Flash Fiction Collective reading series, Flash Challenge Creator for Mslexia Magazine, Co-Founding Editor (with American author Gary Fincke) for theBest Microfiction Anthology Series and serves as Festival Curator for the Flash Fiction Festival, U.K. Meg teaches ongoing online workshops for flash fiction writers.

In a smattering of sassy, wry words Meg Pokrass creates a universe of love in Cellulose Pajamas. These sexy but wistful prose poems hint at entire constellations of affections, relationships at once sweet, sad, satisfying–and not. The poet’s delicately surreal metaphors give her poems so enticing an air that they seem to wear perfume. -Molly Peacock, Author of The Second Blush “The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us.

In her work, off-kilter is the same as clear-eyed focus. Here, strange and normal go hand-in-hand, a marriage that explains nothing but makes so much clear. Time after time, these little stories read big.” -Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) and This Clumsy Living (University of Pittburgh Press, 2007) “Meg Pokrass bops and slams through these little stories like some genius extraterrestrial psychic on a world tour of the human heart.

Her language is supercharged and witty, with humor and sadness in approximately equal amounts.” -Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories, In Country, and The Girl in the Blue Beret “Meg Pokrass gets a lot done in the shortest spaces imaginable, whole worlds in a handful of words, a teeming city of characters arising from mere paragraphs, 55 stories that just won’t quit. And laughs! And tears! And those moments when you have to stop reading and think for a day.

With The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down, Flash Fiction comes of age.” –Bill Roorbach, author of The Remedy for Love and Life Among Giants. “Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving.” — Frederick Barthelme “Meg Pokrass is the new monarch of the delightful and enigmatic tiny kingdom of micro- and flash fiction.

If you want to get close to a definition of this hard-to-define, endlessly variable new form, just read Pokrass’ own stories. It’s all there.” — Brad Watson, Assoc. Professor of Fiction, University of Wyoming MFA Program, and author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives I have admired Meg Pokrass’s work for a long time–Damn Sure Right and Bird Envy among other books. Cellulose Pajamas contains that same bold quality: stories painful and joyful at once.

Meg Pokrass proves once again that she can write an epic on the head of a pin!” -John Skoyles, poetry editor, Ploughsares. Author of A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul and The Situation, A Moveable Famine and The Nut File “Read Damn Sure Right, a collection of miniature tales sure to ruin your waking hours the way you’ll want them ruined.” — Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory Meg Pokrass is an award-winning author, editor and educator of the flash fiction form, and author of four flash fiction collections.

Her latest collection, The Dog Looks Happy Upside Down will be published this Spring by Etruscan Press. Meg is the author of four previous collections: Bird Envy (Harvard Book Store, 2014); Damn Sure Right (Press 53, 2011); Cellulose Pajamas (Blue Light Press, 2015); and My Very End of the Universe, Five Mini-Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form (Rose Metal Press, 2014).

Meg was commissioned to create an original screenplay Sweetooth with veteran screenwriter Graham Gordy (Rectify for Sundance and Quarry for Cinemax) and has co-written featured humor pieces with author Bobbie Ann Mason. Meg’s awards include being a co-recipient of the Gold IPPY (for My Very End of the Universe) and winner of the Blue Light Book Award (for Cellulose Pajamas — Prose Poetry) and her work has been chosen for Wigleaf’s Top 50 many years in a row.

Meg’s flash has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and her stories have appeared in more than 230 literary magazines such as Five Points, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Green Mountains Review, The Rumpus, storySouth, The Literarian, Necessary Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, PANK, Newfound, Wigleaf, and anthologies like Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton, 2015).

Recently, Meg has been teaching flash fiction writing workshops to MFA programs and literary conferences, and has judged many flash fiction competitions. She is the founding editor of New Flash Fiction Review and an associate editor for Frederick Barthelme’s New World Writing.