About

Sarah Salcedo, courtesy of Tall Firs Productions

Anca L. Szilágyi is a writer. Her debut novel, Daughters of the Air, released from Lanternfish Press in December 2017. The Seattle Review of Books called it “a creation of unearthly talents” and Shelf Awareness called it “a striking debut from a writer to watch.”

Her short fiction appears in Lilith Magazine, Gastronomica, Fairy Tale Review, Washington City Paper, and other publications. Her nonfiction appears in Salon, Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Jewish in Seattle, and on the Ploughshares blog. She was awarded an inaugural Made at Hugo House Fellowship to complete her short story collection More Like Home Than Home and, for Dreams Under Glass, her second novel (forthcoming from Lanternfish Press September 2022), she was awarded a grant from 4Culture and a 2015 Jack Straw fellowship. In 2015, she was awarded the inaugural Artist Trust / Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award, a $10,000 prize given to one fiction writer in Washington State. The Stranger hailed Anca as one of the “fresh new faces in Seattle fiction” and “a fantastic magical realist.”

Born in Queens and raised in Brooklyn, Anca studied literature and archaeology at McGill University. She also holds an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) from Teachers College, Columbia University. She has worked as an ESL instructor and paralegal and has performed modern dance in a former soap factory.  In 2011, she earned an MFA from the University of Washington, where she also taught fiction writing, and was awarded the Richard Blessing Scholarship. From 2012-2016 she co-curated The Furnace Reading Series at Hollow Earth Radio with Corinne Manning. She currently lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing online at Atlas Obscura, Hugo House, StoryStudio Chicago, the Newberry Library, and in the MA program in English and Creative Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.

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