George Choundas
Photo by Peter Choundas
Bio
George Choundas is a Cuban and Greek American and a former FBI agent. He has published a book of essays (Until All You See Is Sky, winner of the EastOver Prize for Nonfiction) and a book of stories (The Making Sense of Things, winner of the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize). He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best Microfiction nominee, a Best of the Net finalist, and a winner of the New Millennium Award for Fiction for a story the award’s founding editor called among the best ever to win the prize. A former writer-in-residence at the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, he has work in more than 75 publications, including The Best Small Fictions, Boulevard, Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review, Santa Monica Review,and the Southern Review.
Everybody knows writing is a solitary activity. Writers know it is triple-solitary. We work alone behind closed doors. We work alone while holding other jobs, whole sets of other-job colleagues blamelessly oblivious to our creative careers. We work alone and push ourselves to stay original and to choose conviction over convention and to bend and break things, nourished only by a keen uncertainty about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how it’ll all come out. Receiving this fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts is more than a profound honor and a thrill. It’s real nourishment. It’s the kind of supportive recognition that will keep me company at my pre-dawn kitchen table for pages and pages to come. I’m so grateful.