“Bernard Grant’s stories are compassionate, deeply perceptive explorations of what happens to people who can’t move forward.”
“Trapped by circumstance, by past traumas, by themselves, Bernard’s characters manage to hope for different lives, even as they accept that they probably won’t get them. They speak to each other, and to us, in ways that are simultaneously complex and straightforward, but always believably, and inevitably poignant. These are quietly unsettling stories that sit uneasily in your heart long after you’ve finished them.”
Writing
Bernard’s fiction and essays have been nominated for the Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has been published in dozens of literary venues, including Third Coast, The South Carolina Review, Crab Orchard Review, Craft, and New Delta Review.
They’ve authored two prose chapbooks—Puzzle Pieces (Paper Nautilus Press, 2016) and Fly Back at Me (Sundress Publications, 2017). Their novel-in-stories manuscript, has been finalized in book prizes from Texas Tech University Press and Southeast Missouri State University Press.
Bernard is represented by Madison Smartt Bell at Ayesha Pande Literary Agency.
Editing
Bernard has worked as a reader, marketer, and editor for independent and university literary publications, including The Review Review, Pithead Chapel, The Nervous Breakdown, and The Cincinnati Review. Bernard is currently a fiction editor at Tahoma Literary Review.
Education, Honors, Awards
Bernard holds a BA in film studies and creative writing from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University, where they were awarded the Carol Houck Smith Graduate Scholarship and the Deborah Tall Memorial Scholarship.
Bernard has also received fellowships and residency support from The Anderson Center at Tower View, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Fishtrap: Writing and the West, the Jack Straw Cultural Center, Mineral School, Vermont Studio Center, and the University of Cincinnati, where they earned a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature.
In addition to Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominations, Bernard’s writing has appeared in several literary anthologies, taught in creative writing classrooms across the country, and has been finalized by or received prizes from writing contests with Crab Orchard Review, Cutbank Literary Journal, Paper Nautilus Press, and Sequestrum Literary Journal.