Dr. Amina Lolita Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for her short story collection At-Risk. Gautier is the second African American writer to win this award in its thirty year history. She is also the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her short story collection Now We Will Be Happy.Gautier is a writer, scholar, and professor. Her background as a scholar of 19th Century American literature and, more generally, African American literature combines with her training as a fiction writer such that she is both a critic and a creative writer, fully engaged in the analysis and creation of literature. Her critical work focuses on such nineteenth century American authors as Charles W. Chesnutt, Elleanor Eldridge, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman. Gautier is a graduate of The Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH), Stanford University, from which she earned both a bachelor and master's degree within four years, and the University of Pennsylvania where she received a master's degree and Ph.D. She has been a Mellon Minority Undergraduate Fellow (now Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow) at Stanford University, a Fontaine Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Her academic memberships include AWP, MLA, and MELUS. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at University of Miami.Gautier has published a record number of short stories. More than seventy of her short stories have been published and her fiction appears in African American Review, African Voices, Antioch Review, B&A: New Fiction, Cicada, Chattahoochee Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iconoclast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Opium.com, Pindeldyboz, Pleiades, Quarter After Eight, Red Rock Review, River Styx, Salt Hill, Shenandoah, Southeast Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Storyquarterly, Studio Magazine, Sycamore Review, Timber Creek Review, Today's Black Woman, Torch, and Yemassee among other places.Gautier's work has been extensively reprinted, appearing in several anthologies, including Best African American Fiction 2009, Best African American Fiction 2010, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2008, The Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years, The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, and Voices. Gautier is the recipient of the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Danahy Fiction Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Award. She has received fellowships and scholarships from Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Sewanee Writer's Conference, Callaloo Writer's Workshop, Hurston/Wright Writer's Workshop, and the Ucross Residency. Gautier was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and is of African-American and Puerto Rican heritage. Her professional memberships include NAACP, National Association of University Women (NAUW), National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), and National Urban League. Gautier is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. Dr. Amina Gautier divides her time between Miami and Chicago.