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Cara Blue Adams is an American author. She has won awards and attended several literary conferences and residencies over the years, such as The Kenyon Review 's Short Fiction Prize and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has written both fiction and non-fiction works and has been published in numerous literary journals, magazines and presses, including Granta and The New York Times.

Adams has a background in editing, but since her writing success she has featured in writing panels, podcasts and journals to discuss her craft. After years of editing for literary journals and magazines, Adams moved on to teaching, and now works as an assistant professor.

Education and Early Career
Adams first joined the literary world as a teenager when she joined the staff of her high school journal. She later received her Bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature from Smith College in 1999 and went on to complete a Master of Fine Arts degree in Fiction at the University of Arizona.

After graduating from college, Adams worked as a temp at a shipping company and spent five years at an immigration law firm, which she reported has informed the writing of her forthcoming novel.

Adams moved to Conway, South Carolina in 2014, where she worked as an assistant professor of creative writing at Coastal Carolina University. She is currently working as an Assistant Professor of English at Seton Hall University in New Jersey where she teaches creative writing.

Editing
At age 29, Adams joined the editorial staff of the Southern Review at Louisiana State University. The magazine was quickly aligned with the New Criticism movement, which Adams referred to as being a governing legacy over her studies at Smith College.

New Criticism is a formalist movement from the mid-20th Century. Its methodology centres around how words and their meanings relate to ancient and foreign languages.

Over time, the Southern Review has featured writers such as Ford Maddox Ford, Katherine Anne Porter, Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot. Adams worked at the magazine for five years and, in 2011, she was promoted to co-editor until she left in June of 2013.

In October 2013, Adams served as guest editor for digital publisher Electric Literature, where she wrote about Jason Brown's short fiction piece, Wintering Over.

Writing
In 2009, Narrative magazine named Adams as one of their “15 Below 30” writers. She was also awarded the Arts Quebec Artist-in-Residence Grant in 2016 from the New York State Council.

Adams also featured on the literary podcast The Dunken Odyssey’s Episode 27, uploaded on December 8, 2012, wherein she discussed craft, her time as an editor for The Southern Review and the creative writing industry.

Fiction
Adams won the 2008 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize for her first ever published work, I Met Loss the Other Day. In 2010, her short fiction piece Exit was featured in The Sun (magazine). Five years later, Adams was selected as one of just twenty artists to participate in the six-week-long Lighthouse Works residency program on Fishers Island.

She was also a 2018-19 Centre for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow and has forthcoming works to be featured in Alaska Quarterly Review and Story.

Adams is currently working on a novel that follows an immigration paralegal in Boston as she attempts to help a Somali refugee who was smuggled illegally into America on a fake passport.

Non-Fiction
Essay Daily, an online forum for critical engagement and conversation, published an essay Adams wrote on the Saturday Night Live comedy skit ‘Drunk Uncle’.

Her discourse engaged with an essay written by writer Mike Scalise titled Say Uncle, published on the Paris Review website. Scalise’s essay discusses the ‘drunk uncle’ stereotype and Bobby Moynihan’s performance in the SNL sketch.

In 2015, Adams contributed to an anthology published by the University of Chicago press that examined the role of small magazines in the digital age. Entitled The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, the anthology compiles essays from twenty-three different editors of small literary magazines.

The collection received positive reviews from literary journals such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and Ellen Litman of the University of Connecticut wrote that Adams’s essay was among "the most compelling” in the anthology. Adams also contributed to Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting and Surviving Your First Book by Courtney Maum.

Conferences
In March of 2016, Adams was featured in Poets & Writers’ series ‘The Aha! Moment’ where she discussed the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as well as her response to Mai Nardone’s short story 1997. The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference offers twenty-five emerging writers a place at the US’s oldest conference in Ripton, Vermont. Adams was a fellow and scholar of the conference from 2010-14 and served as a member of their board of admissions for three years, from 2015-18.

In early March 2020, Adams was an attendant of the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, held in San Antonio, Texas. Inspired by the impact of the arising COVID-19 pandemic, Adams published a piece on her experience. Michael Ricciardelli, writing for the Seton Hall University website, discussed Adams’s essay in an article titled ‘Creative Writing Professor Publishes Essay in The Believer Chronicling Onset of Pandemic.’

Her non-fiction essay, entitled ‘Experimental Fiction Panel at the End of the World’, appeared in the eight-time National Magazine Award finalist publication, The Believer.

Adams was scheduled to lead three panels at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference. One, held on March 5, explored innovative fiction in today’s society and examined Zadie Smith’s essay “Two Paths for the Novel.” Adams attended the panel with four other writers, including Manuel Gonzales, author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories and The Regional Office is Under Attack!, and Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine.

On the same day, Adams also moderated a panel called ‘Five Writers Walk into a Bar: Using Humor in Fiction.’ Alongside her were Danielle Evans (Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self), Kristen Arnett (Felt in the Jaw, Mostly Dead Things). Jennine Capó Crucet (My Time Among the Whites, Make Your Home Among Strangers, How to Leave Hialeah) and Courtney Maum (Costalegre, Touch, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You).

Awards and Nominations
Adams’s work has been published twice in the Kenyon Review (in both 2008 and 2017) and her first ever published piece, ‘I Met Loss the Other Day,’ won the journal’s Literary Prize in 2008. In 2010, she was awarded first runner up in the Blue Mesa Review Fiction Contest.

Her fiction piece The Sea Latch won the 2014 William Peden Prize and Adams was awarded $1000 prize money. The Peden Prize is an annual award hosted by the Missouri Review, and the story was originally published in the magazine’s Spring 2013 issue.

In 2019, Adams’s piece Desert Light was awarded the Meringoff Writer Award for fiction. She won alongside writer JP Gritton, whose novel Wyoming was listed as a Kirkus Best Debut Fiction of 2019.

Grants and Fellowships
Adams has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

She was also awarded a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts Quebec Artist-in-Residence Grant from 2016-17.

Fiction

 * “I Met Loss the Other Day” in The Kenyon Review (2008)
 * "Exit"﻿ in The Sun ﻿ (2009)
 * “At the Wrong Time, to the Wrong People” in Narrative (2010)
 * “The Sea Latch” in The Missouri Review (2013)
 * “In the End” in Epoch﻿ (2014)
 * “Seeing Clear” in The Mississippi Review﻿﻿ (2014)
 * “Said Yes” in The Kenyon Review (2017)
 * “Charity” in The Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellows Anthology (2018)
 * “Above the Ground” in West Branch (2018)
 * “Paper” in Gulf Coast (2018)
 * “Palacio de los Pollos” in Epoch (2018)
 * "The Most Common State of Matter" in Granta (2019)
 * “The Foothills of Tucson” in American Short Fiction (2019)
 * “Desert Light” (2019)
 * “The Birdcage” in Story (forthcoming)
 * “You Never Get it Back” in Alaska Quarterly Review (forthcoming)

Non-Fiction

 * “The Personality of a Translator” in Essay Daily (2013)
 * "Things American: Writers Remember James Salter" in American Short Fiction (2015)
 * “Decent Company Between the Covers"﻿﻿ in The Little Magazine in Contemporary America, edited by Joanne Diaz and Ian Morris (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
 * “On Technology and Fiction” in Boulevard (2016)
 * “Experimental Fiction Panel at the End of the World” in The Believer (2020)