Becky Hagenston is the author of four award-winning story collections, most recently The Age of Discovery and Other Stories, which won The Journal's Non/Fiction Prize and was published by The Ohio State University Press/ Mad Creek Books in August 2021. The collection also won the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters prize in fiction.
Her third collection, Scavengers, was chosen by Benjamin Percy as the winner of the Permafrost Book Prize and was published in 2016 by the University of Alaska Press. Her second collection, Strange Weather, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was published in March 2010 by Press 53. Her first book, A Gram of Mars, won the Mary McCarthy Prize and was published by Sarabande Books.
She is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission fellowship in fiction. She has won a 2020 Pushcart Prize and two O. Henry Awards, as well as the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Reynolds Price Award in Short Fiction, and the Julia Peterkin Award. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Subtropics, and many other journals.
She grew up in Maryland and received an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA from New Mexico State University. She has received residencies to Yaddo and Ucross. She has also received scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Becky is a Professor of English at Mississippi State University and lives in Starkville, Mississippi with her husband.
Photo by Megan Bean