Writing alumna Jayme Koszyn ’18 was named a finalist in Fish Publications Flash Fiction Short List for her flash fiction short story, “In the Here and Now.” Out of the 1,238 stories submitted, only fifty made it to the short-list.
Additionally, Koszyn’s short story “Test Prep” appeared in the winter 2019 issue of The London Reader.
“In the Here and Now” is a story about a girl losing her virginity; “Test Prep” is a mother’s recollection of her closest brush with mortality, which had taken place during a tutoring gig. Both stories were born in Columbia MFA workshops. In a comment to the university, Koszyn said, “The story ‘In the Here and Now’ is based on a prompt about describing a place. I kept working on it, and it ended up in my thesis. Then I shortened it even further, submitted it, and it made the shortlist.”
Koszyn is a former stage director, trained at Princeton University. “I did a lot of writing in that era, and kept writing when I was working at BAM. When my son left for school, I decided to get real training, and applied to Columbia’s fiction program, where I took classes with teachers like Paul Beatty, Victor Lavalle, Sam Lipsyte, and Benjamin Taylor.”
Currently, she is working on a cluster of short stories, some of which she started at Columbia—the current title of this collection is The Math Teacher and Other Stories. She is also working on a novel called Yonkers.
Koszyn runs the New York-based nonprofit Koszyn & Company. Koszyn graduated from New York City public schools, Princeton University magna cum laude, received an MFA from the School of the Arts at Columbia University in 2018, and was a Telluride Scholar at Cornell University; she holds a certificate from the Program on Negotiation and Business Structures at Harvard Law and Business Schools.