Alumna Daphne Palasi Andreades ’19 Wins O. Henry Prize, Published in ‘The Best Short Stories 2021’

By
Rebecca Pinwei Tseng
September 22, 2021

Anchor Books recently published The Best Short Stories 2021: The O. Henry Prize Winners, a twenty-story collection which includes “Brown Girls” by alumna Daphne Palasi Andreades ’19.

"Brown Girls" was first published by Kenyon Review after Andreades won first place in the 2019 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. The short story, comprising five vignettes, is about young women of color who live in Queens, New York. Judge Mia Alvar wrote for the Kenyon Review: “‘Brown Girls’ is a vibrant, pitch-perfect tale of growing up and making good, leaving home and looking back... With every stirring image and tight, musical turn of phrase, this story charmed, often surprised, and deeply moved me.” Virginia Quarterly Review also featured “Brown Girls” in a series titled The Best 200 Words I Read All Week.

Andreades’s short story is part of a novel, Brown Girls (Random House, 2022), where "Brown Girls" appears in novella form. In 2020, Andreades signed a two-book deal for her debut novel and a forthcoming novel. Associate Professor Paul Beatty writes in a review of Brown Girls: “This book’s a gift—a smooth subway seat on a crowded Queens local, bound to everywhere and offered to those people, places, and dreams that forever keep and feed us, because memory—like off-brand bodega cottage cheese—has no expiration date. This one’s a ride—watch the open doors.”

The O. Henry Prize is the oldest major prize for short fiction in the United States. The award was established in 1919 and has been given annually since, with the exception of 2020. Series editor Jenny Minton Quigle and guest editor Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie selected the 2021 winners out of 1,000 short stories published by literary magazines and journals this past year. Adichie writes in the introduction of The Best Short Stories 2021: “I look to stories for consolation, the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up every day, as templates for life, for news of how others live, for reminders that life’s mysteries have no keys. Above all else I look to fiction for a kind of wisdom. Wisdom feels old-fashioned, as a word and as an idea, but if there is a unifying theme in these stories it is that they are all profoundly wise.”

The Best Short Stories 2021 is now available for purchase.

Daphne Palasi Andreades’s debut novel, Brown Girls, is forthcoming from Random House in the US on January 4, 2022, as well with publishers in Germany, France, and the UK. Andreades is a graduate of CUNY Baruch College and Columbia University’s Fiction MFA Program, where she was awarded a Henfield Prize and a Creative Writing Teaching Fellowship. She is the recipient of a 2021 O. Henry Prize, and scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, where she won the Voices of Color Prize, and other honors. Her fiction often explores diaspora, immigration, and the far-reaching effects of colonialism and imperialism. She lives in New York City.