Outer Stars, Kirsten’s fourth story collection, won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize and will publish with University of North Texas Press in November of 2025.

“Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is a master storyteller, and Outer Stars is a mesmerizing, deeply felt collection about the necessity of human connection and the acceptance of those things we can’t change.” -Andrew Porter, author ofThe Imagined Life

“In her haunting and beautiful story collection Outer Stars, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum explores isolation and grief—grief for lost love and children, grief for the life never lived but mourned nonetheless, grief for a changing planet. Her language is elegant, elegiac, prescient, perfectly crafted for the task of describing unbearable losses—both losses behind us and those yet to come. This collection demonstrates why I read everything this author writes.” - Lori Ostlund, author of Are You Happy?

Pre-order the collection here.

* Outer Stars’s beautiful cover image uses a painting by the artist Adam Fung. For more on his work, please see his website.