Iowa Short Fiction Award winner Sohrab Homi Fracis shares how contests and competitions helped shape his writing career. In addition to the Iowa, Sohrab's work has been shortlisted and decorated by a long list of festivals and associations, including the South Asia Literary Association. He is warm, gracious, and intelligent and I appreciated the insight he shared on how novels and scripts can have much longer "legs" than just publication. 

Sohrab's timely novel on the immigrant experience, Go Home, is a perfect example of such long legs: it was recently shortlisted by Stanford for the William Saroyan International Prize. 

I'm excited to share my friend and his wisdom with you, my fellow working writers! 

A review of Go Home from Sohrab's website: 

"At the heart of Sohrab Homi Fracis's poignant new novel, Go Home, is the question of one's place in the world, the answer never more ambiguous or fragile than for the immigrant or exile, when a person's condition of homelessness is in transition, neither here nor there. Given the cultural moment, I'm grateful to Fracis for his highly topical reexamination of the American Dream, a still reliable but never easy remedy for all those yearning to reinvent themselves beyond the constrictions of tribe and nation. And in Go Home, assimilation, sometimes a wretched exercise, can also be a hilarious and uplifting affair."

- Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul (Dayton Literary Peace Prize) and Easy in the Islands (National Book Award)

Photo credit: Madison Gross