photo by: Contributed

Lawrence author Amy Stuber and her mom, Penny Moeller, are pictured in New York City, where Stuber collected the PEN/Binghham literary prize on May 8, 2025, for her short story collection.

It was a great honor for Lawrence author Amy Stuber to be nominated for a prestigious literary prize. She had been honing her craft for decades, and being a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection in her mid-50s brought a pleasant sense of validation.

But a trip to New York is expensive and she wasn’t feeling too great, so she thought she’d skip the ceremony.

“I almost didn’t go,” she said. “I wasn’t really up for it, and I didn’t have any thought that I could win.”

But then of course she did win.

“It was a big shock,” she told the Journal-World Friday, a week after her book “Sad Grownups” won the $25,000 prize at the 61st annual PEN America Literary Awards. “I was very, very surprised and did not expect that.”

Her last-minute decision to go not only meant that she got to accept the award in person, but also that she got to do so with her mom and daughter, who attends college in New York, looking on — a fitting scene for an author whose next two books will focus on mothers and daughters.

photo by: Stillhouse

The cover of Amy Stuber’s award-winning book.

The PEN/Bingham prize is awarded each year to “an author whose debut collection of short stories represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise for future work,” according to the organization’s website.

The three writers judging the contest — Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Leah Hampton and Wendy Wimmer — called the 17 stories in Stuber’s “Sad Grownups” a “remarkable” debut. It’s a collection “full of surprises, both in its craft and content. Amy Stuber’s stories feel deeply familiar yet wholly unique, with mature, expansive explorations of womanhood, work and labor, the body, and the short story form itself, featuring characters who persist outside and beyond their narratives.”

Other finalists for the prize were Annell Lopez (“I’ll Give You a Reason”); Iheoma Nwachukwu (“Japa and Other Stories”); Marguerite Sheffer (“The Man in the Banana Trees”); and Megan Howell (“Softie: Stories).

The titular story of Stuber’s “Sad Grownups” centers on two 19-year-old boys who make a reckless (and criminal) decision in an attempt to win the attention of a crush. The story “Little Women” moves through the perspectives of four young women cast as Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy as they live through a reality show modeled on the “influencer houses” of the social media era, but with an artificially created 19th century atmosphere. The story “Doctor Visit” cycles through three alternative versions of a family tragedy and a doomed love affair as the protagonist tries to arrive at a reality that makes sense.

Though “Sad Grownups” was Stuber’s first book deal — it was published by the independent press Stillhouse last October — she has steadily published her short stories in magazines for years and has won the odd prize here and there.

As Stuber, a Kansas City native who’s lived in Lawrence for the past 20 years, told the Journal-World last fall when “Sad Grownups” came out, she would have preferred to get the professional acclaim in her 30s but, on the other hand, “I like that it’s at this point in my life because I feel like it’s a reminder to people that there’s nothing that earth shattering about continuing your creative work your whole life.”

The $25,000 prize will be lovely to have on hand — she intends to donate part of it to Palestinian relief efforts — but something that pleased her even more was getting to meet the family of the late Robert W. Bingham, her prize’s namesake, at the ceremony in New York.

Bingham’s widow and sister “came up and talked to me,” Stuber said, “and that was incredibly meaningful.”

Bingham, who died of a heroin overdose in 1999 at age 33, wrote the short story collection “Pure Slaughter Value,” which Stuber remembers having read 20-odd years ago, and the novel “Lightning on the Sun.”

Since publishing “Sad Grownups” Stuber has been working on two novels, both involving multi-generational female plot lines. One is a completed novel that she revisited and revised and is hoping to get out into the world soon. It centers on three generations of women in San Francisco and explores issues related to activism, relationships and COVID.

The other novel is in its early stages — she’s only about 100 pages in — but it too will center on women and their mothers (a familiar theme, but a bottomless well, as any woman with a mother knows).

“It’s kind of about their lives sort of falling apart and coming back together in various ways,” Stuber said.

Asked how she celebrated after the ceremony last week, Stuber said she and her mom went back to the hotel and ate stale cookies.

“We had gotten bakery cookies the day before, and that’s what we did,” she said, not mentioning that her mom was surely already full of fresh pride.

photo by: PEN screenshot

Lawrence author Amy Stuber accepts the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection at the 61st annual PEN America Literary Awards on May, 2025, in New York City.