Daniel S.C. Sutter
Daniel S.C. Sutter is a 2025-27 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, The Carolina Quarterly, BOOTH, Fugue, and elsewhere. His work has won the Robert Watson Literary Prize for Fiction and the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. Daniel is from Tampa, Florida.
by Daniel S.C. Sutter
Winner of the 2026 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction
Publication date: May 3
Purchase an early copy and meet Dan at AWP in Baltimore, MD (Press 53, booth 610), March 5-7
Pre-orders will ship before the publication date
ISBN 978-1-968783-04-4
8.5 × 5.5-inch softcover, 160 pages
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
Sutter’s haunting, darkly comic stories are set in the parts of Florida that tourists rarely see, places where his engaging, hapless characters struggle to get by. Debris is a true gem, crafted by a truly brilliant writer.
─Elizabeth Stuckey-French, author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady