Daniel S.C. Sutter

Daniel S.C. Sutter is a 2025-27 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University and an M.F.A. from the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. His fiction has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, Carolina Quarterly, BOOTH, Fugue, and elsewhere. His work has won The Robert Watson Literary Prize and been named a finalist for The Iowa Review Fiction Award, The Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Prose, and others. He is from Tampa, Florida.

Judge’s Comment:

“It takes a special kind of storyteller to write characters who can be uncanny but never unfamiliar. These are stories of Kings, Mantises, Wizards, astronauts, phantoms, and prisoners of more than one kind, innocent and guilty, sometimes both at once. They are also stories of fathers, children, lovers, sisters, friends. A mother asks her son, ‘What is life to you? To you specifically.’ None of these stories will answer the question, but they remind us there is something necessary (if also absurd, if also strangely beautiful) about the asking.”

─Claire V. Foxx, Press 53 Short Fiction Editor

Praise for Debris: Stories

Sutter writes as if electrified by the final volts of the American Dream. The Apollo moon landing, Watergate, a perfect game thrown by a one-armed man; our moments of public fascination often serve as the backdrop for Debris’ unstable private citizenry. As feverishly hopeful as they are self-destructive, Sutter’s characters keep you turning the pages to see what else they may run into heart-first; a mother’s loving arms or a fist? With every sentence in this collection as taut as a wire, Sutter leaves no doubt: Debris is the launching pad of a great new voice in American fiction.

─M.O. Walsh, NYT Bestselling author of My Sunshine Away and The Big Door Prize