PETER ORNER

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). A film version of one of Orner's stories, The Raft, is currently in production and stars Ed Asner.

A new book of oral histories, edited by Orner, Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, will be published in May, 2008 by McSweeneys for the Voice of Witness Series. For more information, go to voiceofwitness.org.

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize and is being translated into French, Italian, and German. The novel is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's.

Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award.

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual. Orner has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations.

Currently, Peter Orner is an associate professor at San Francisco State University.