For the 2021 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Contest, Joyelle McSweeney has selected Benefit Street by Adria Bernardi.

(Image credit: Isaac Stovall)

Adria Bernardi is a writer and translator whose publications include an oral history, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories, and two novels.  Her translations from the Italian include the prose of Gianni Celati and the poetry of Tonino Guerra and Raffaello Baldini.  She has been awarded the 1999 Bakeless Prize for Fiction, the 2000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the 2007 Raiziss/DePalchi Translation Award.  She has taught fiction-writing at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. She lives in Nashville.