Courtney Sender has won the $1000 Lawrence Foundation Prize for 2014. The prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of MQR to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. Sender’s story “We Can Practice Starts” appeared in the Spring 2014 issue.
“We Can Practice Starts” a clever homage to Flannery O’Connor, is by turns humorous, touching, and terrifying. It was chosen to appear on our website as featured content from our Spring issue.
Sender is the thirty-seventh winner of the prize, joining, among other authors, Charles Baxter, Paul Bowles, Susan Dodd, Clark Blaise, Sena Jeter Naslund, Rebecca Makkai, Alice Mattison, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The prize is endowed by the Lawrence Foundation and its director, Leonard S. Bernstein, an alumnus of the University of Michigan and himself a fiction writer.
She is a native of Montvale, New Jersey, and her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train (Fiction Open first place), Crazyhorse, Tin House online, Esquire, Five Chapters, and The Carolina Quarterly. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and a BA in English from Yale.
