Will Boast '01 Selected as Final Judge in Nick Adams Short Story Contest

Knox College alumnus Will Boast '01, author of award-winning fiction and the New York Times bestselling memoir Epilogue, will serve as final judge for the 46th annual Nick Adams Short Story Contest.

The contest is open to students attending institutions in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, a consortium of 14 liberal arts colleges, and it awards a $1,000 cash prize for the author of the winning story. Students can enter the Nick Adams contest by submitting their short stories to the English department on their campus. A faculty committee will choose the finalists, and Boast will select the winning story.

This will be Boast's second time as a participant in the Nick Adams Contest, though in a different role. While a Knox student, one of his stories was awarded honorable mention in the contest, a recognition that he has called a milestone in his development as a writer.

"Everyone with a literary bent at Knox knew about the Nick Adams Contest, and it was a big deal to even be considered," Boast recalled. "You know you're going up against some of the best writers from some very fine schools. One of my classmates (very rightly) won our junior year, and, darn, was I jealous—but also proud for our writing program. The next year I had a bit of luck and got an honorable mention for one of my stories."

Since the Nick Adams Contest began in 1973, Knox has won the contest 12 times, which is more than any other college in the ACM.

"It's pretty much always a long road to write, really, anything, but there are milestones along the way that give you a chance to celebrate and take heart. That mention was definitely one for me, so I'm doubly grateful to have a chance to judge the contest this year."

Boast joins a distinguished group of writers who have served previously as final judges for the contest, including Maya Angelou, Audrey Niffenegger, Larry Heinemann, Bharati Mukherjee, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler, Stuart Dybek, and many more.

Boast graduated from Knox in 2001 with a degree in what then was called English writing, now known as creative writing. He returned to campus in February 2017 as part of the Visiting Writers Series in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Knox's Program in Creative Writing.

He received the 2011 Iowa Short Fiction Award for Power Ballads (2011), his collection of stories drawn from experiences touring and recording with several bands. Boast's debut novel, Daphne, will be published by Norton/Liveright and Granta Books in February 2018.

Epilogue (2014) was a BBC Book of the Week and a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. In a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, novelist Nellie Hermann wrote, "It is a truly rare feat for a book to both break your heart and make you wish it wouldn't end: Epilogue does both. Boast has shown us life as it really is: beautiful, strange, cruel, surprising, and rarely so honestly explored."

Boast's fiction, essays, and reporting have appeared online and in print in The New Republic, Granta, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Magazine, among numerous other publications.

Recently, his reporting has focused on migration and the intersection of culture and politics, including spirit worship and democratic reforms in Myanmar, nomadic sports and post-Soviet national identity in Kazakhstan, and Gambia's outsized role in the European migration crisis. His advocacy work is centered around teaching English and college prep workshops at the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome.

Currently a full-time faculty member in the writing program at the University of Chicago, Boast has been a Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.

A native of England, Boast grew up in Ireland and rural Wisconsin before earning his undergraduate degree at Knox.

The Nick Adams Short Story contest, named after the young protagonist of many stories by Ernest Hemingway, was established in 1973 with funds from an anonymous donor to encourage fiction writing at ACM colleges.