Kaylie Saidin is the winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize

Hub City Press is pleased to announce that Kaylie Saidin has won the 2026 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize for her collection, Goose Update. The prize judge this year was Catherine Lacey. 

The Curtis Prize is awarded to an emerging Southern writer, and Saidin will receive $5000 and publication by Hub City Press of her short story collection in 2027. The previous winners of the prize are Robert Busby for Bodock: Stories, Scott Gloden for The Great American Everything in 2023, Andrew Siegrist for We Imagined It Was Rain in 2020, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips for Sleepovers in 2019, and Emily W. Pease for Let Me Out Here in 2018. Winners have been featured in The New Yorker, Poets & Writers, The Paris Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other outlets.

The Curtis Prize was named in honor of C. Michael Curtis, who served as an editor of The Atlantic since 1963 and as fiction editor since 1982 and discovered or edited some of the finest short story writers of the modern era, including Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Anne Beattie. He edited several acclaimed anthologies, including Contemporary New England Stories, God: Stories, and Faith: Stories. Curtis moved to Spartanburg, S.C. in 2006 and taught at both Wofford and Converse Colleges, in addition to serving on the editorial board of Hub City Press. This prize is made possible by a generous contribution from Michel and Eliot Stone of Spartanburg.

Kaylie Saidin is a writer and surfer based in coastal North Carolina. Her stories have been published in Oxford American, New Orleans Review, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from UNC Wilmington and her BA from Loyola University New Orleans. She is currently working on a novel. 

Saidin says, “I’m thrilled to have Goose Update find its home with Hub City Press. Their commitment to advocating for and furthering Southern literature makes them such an exciting publisher for this collection, and I’m honored to appear alongside their list of inimitable and inspiring authors.”

Saidin's collection was chosen by judge Catherine Lacey. Catherine Lacey is the author of four novels: Biography of X, Pew, The Answers, Nobody Is Ever Missing, a short story collection, Certain American States, and one work of both memoir and fiction, The Möbius Book. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman fellowship, an O. Henry, the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, and an award from Lambda for Lesbian Fiction. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages. Her second short story collection, My Stalkers, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2027. She lives in Mexico City.

Lacey said of the collection, “For fans of Miranda July and Bryan Washington, these darkly funny and wide-ranging stories are a study in the failures and confusions of young adulthood. The queer southern men and dramatic southern women who populate this world reveal the intricate betrayals and absurdities that can take place in friendships, marriages, and on the murky borders between socioeconomic classes.”

The finalists for this year's prize were Justine Busto for Queens Road East - A Novel in Stories, Thomas Calder for You & Me, Blair Lee for How to Care for Living Creatures, and Christie Marra for Living with Wolves.

This prize is named in honor of C. Michael Curtis, who served as an editor of The Atlantic since 1963 and as fiction editor since 1982. Curtis discovered or edited some of the finest short story writers of the modern era, including Tobias Wolff, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, and Anne Beattie. He edited several acclaimed anthologies, including Contemporary New England Stories, God: Stories, and Faith: Stories. Curtis moved to Spartanburg, S.C. in 2006 and taught as a professor at both Wofford and Converse Colleges, in addition to serving on the editorial board of Hub City Press. C. Michael Curtis passed away in early 2023. This prize is made possible by a generous contribution from Michel and Eliot Stone of Spartanburg.

The prize will reopen for submissions in September 2027.