Kirsten's newest collection of short stories won the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press. The book will be released in the autumn of 2018. Read more about the collection and the O'Connor Award here. 

Kirsten's essay "On Moving Home" is included in this anthology of women writers writing about home. Edited by Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters and published by Seal Press in November 2017, this book is (as Shawn Colvin writes about it) "An exquisite collection [... that will] inspire you to ponder what your home has been and is--a provocative and worthy pursuit." Read the NYTBR review of This is The Place here.

Dr. Katya Vidović left behind memories of war and a dying mother when she emigrated from Croatia to the United States as a child. Now working with adolescent girls who suffer from eating disorders fueled by the fear of losing control, Katya struggles to help her patients while confronting her own desperate need to make peace with the past. Purchase "Endlings", a Ploughshares Solos publication.

"The stories in Kirsten Lunstrum's new collection, Swimming with Strangers, are smart, harrowing, dramatic, and quite often surprising. In one, the narrator describes the story of her own birth; in another, as the characters discuss fairy tales—one of the characters forces his students to read the Brothers Grimm in their brutal, original forms—the roles of witch and distressed damsel switch back and forth. While we could easily imagine stories like these in which thematic elements take over, Lunstrum keeps them at a low burble, focusing on the reality of these characters’ struggles. It is a very brave choice." (Fiction Writers Review)

Swimming With Strangers, Chronicle Books 2008. Stories from this collection were honored with a PEN/O. Henry Prize, a long listing in the Best American Short Stories series, and a Pushcart nomination. 

"Kirsten Lunstrum's stories are gem stones, multi-faceted, highly polished, more and more complicated the closer you look." (Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness)

This Life She's Chosen, Chronicle Books, 2005. Selected as a Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers title.

"Dear Mistress, you are the cancer in my family's gut, our bleeding ulcer, a bile we cannot swallow." (From "Dear Mistress," Willow Springs, Issue 78)

"It starts at dinner one night. She's been home with the children all day..." (From "Tides," Joyland, Summer 2017 PNW). 

"I have come here for the quiet and the solitude."