Laura Furman (born 1945) is an American author whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Mirabella, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Biography

Furman was born in New York City and attended Hunter College High School and Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. In 1978, she moved to Houston, Texas. After living in Houston, Galveston, Dallas, and Lockhart she settled in Austin with her husband, Joel Warren Barna, and their son. She now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has written four collections of stories The Glass House, Watch Time Fly, Drinking with the Cook, The Mother Who Stayed, two novels The Shadow Line and Tuxedo Park, and a memoir Ordinary Paradise. From 2002 - 2019, she was the series editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories, an annual collection published by Anchor Books. Furman selected the twenty winning stories. She taught for twenty-eight years at the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor of Creative Writing. While at UT, she founded the literary magazine American Short Fiction, which was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.

Awards

Selected bibliography

Books

Short stories

Editor