A Young Writer to Watch

WITH A LIST OF ACHIEVEMENTS far exceeding what one would expect of a writer his age, author Michael Byers '91 has won the praise of critics across the country and established himself as a writer to watch. Visiting his alma mater in late February, Michael read selections from his first collection of short stories, The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), now in its third printing.

Introduced by Creative Writing Professor Sylvia Wantanabe as a writer who can "do what we want fiction to do by taking us out of our own lives," Michael proceeded to do just that in his public reading to a full house of aspiring Oberlin writers.

By turns lighthearted and profound, contemporary and historically focused, Michael's stories are about "the shadowy obsessive passions that govern and shape our lives," writes author Charles Baxter, who calls the stories "wise, beautiful and necessary."

Michael has won numerous awards and prizes for his work, including the 1999 Sue Kauffman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the Whiting Foundation Writer's Award and a Stenger Fellowship from Stanford University and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His stories have been selected for The Best American Short Stories 1997, Prize Stories 1995: The O'Henry Awards, and featured in American Short Fiction and the Missouri Review, among other publications. His visit to Oberlin was cosponsored by the Alumni Association.
 
-by David Shernoff '02