Prairie Lights: Will Boast – The Submerged

Will Boast will read from his new short story collection, The Submerged, which was named the 2026 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction by the University of Georgia Press.

The University of Georgia Press offers this introduction to The Submerged, which is praised by Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans, as “Bursting with compassion and wit and intelligence:”

“In ten surprising and subtly devastating stories, Will Boast explores the complex ways in which we long for a home, for connection and purpose. A Sicilian barber takes on a refugee as an apprentice and upends his own quiet village life. A lonely New York architect starts an ill-advised relationship with an aspiring congressman. The comic mayhem of teenage locals in a tourist town suddenly turns deadly serious. A shooting in northern Wisconsin involving an immigrant sets a community against itself. The Submerged draws unforgettable portraits of those forced into exile and those who choose it themselves. Boast asks just what we’ll do when the time comes to leave everything behind.”

Will Boast is the author of a story collection, Power Ballads; a memoir, Epilogue; and a novel, Daphne. His second  collection, The Submerged, won the 2026 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and is forthcoming this September. His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in  The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Guardian, The American Scholar, Granta, and  the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He’s held fellowships from Stanford University, the American Academy in Rome, the University of East Anglia, Yaddo, and MacDowell, and he’s taught at Stanford, the University of Chicago, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome. He resides in Chicago and London.