Photo by Barney Cokeliss, 2021
Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize, and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, as well as a New York Times Book Review “New & Noteworthy Selection.”
Her stories, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. Her writing has won the Berlin Writing Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. She has completed residencies at MacDowell, Hedgebrook, The Circus Hotel (through The Reader Berlin), and Ragdale. In addition, she has been included in New City’s Lit 50 list as well as the Guild Literary Complex’s list of 30 Writers to Watch.
Originally from rural Wisconsin, Rachel earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison and a PhD in English (Creative Writing) from Western Michigan University. She has taught writing and literature at The School of the Art Institute - Chicago, Cornell College, Western Michigan University, and Kalamazoo College. She lives in Chicago.