Emily W. Pease is the author of Let Me Out Here, inaugural winner of the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Award at Hub City Press, 2018, selected by Lee K. Abbott.

Her stories appear in Witness, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Crazyhorse (now Swamp Pink), Alaska Quarterly Review, Narrative online, and Kenyon Review online. An early story, “Tad Lincoln’s Ladder of Dreams,” won the Editor’s Prize in Fiction at The Missouri Review in 1999. After spending nearly a decade trying to work that story into a novel, she returned to short fiction. Her collection is, in part, a result of her re-dedication to that form.

Since the pandemic, Emily has focused on writing poetry. Her poems appear in One, Rattle (Ekphrastic Challenge winner, June, 2021), Juniper, Litmosphere, and The Florida Review. Her poem, “Lone Pony On the Last Farm In the City,” was selected by Nickole Brown as winner of the 2025 William Matthews Poetry Prize at Asheville Poetry Review. More recently, “Veer,” was selected by Stephen Kuusisto as the winner of the 2025 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize.