Columbia Fiction Foundry member, Jennifer Sears, has won the 2025 John Simmons Short Fiction Award for her short story collection, What Mennonite Girls Are Good For, to be published in the fall by the University of Iowa Press. The CFF congratulates her accomplishment.
The novelist Margot Livesey, the judge for the award, noted, “In these marvelous, deeply suspenseful stories, Sears writes with remarkable intimacy and lack of judgement about the deeply conflicted Ruthie and the religion she no longer believes in. By the end of What Mennonite Girls Are Good For, I felt I’d seen ‘that ancient truth— how small we all stand.’”
In the eleven connected stories in What Mennonite Girls are Good For, Ruthie, a Mennonite minister’s daughter moves from a youthful, exuberant understanding of her family’s faith toward religious doubt. Stumbling comically at times, Ruthie navigates life with and without the rules and values in which she’s been raised.
What Mennonite Girls Are Good For will be published in fall of 2025 by the University of Iowa Press.