Audrey Petty

Audrey Petty is a writer and educator. She writes fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. Her stories have been published in such journals as African American Review, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, and The Massachusetts Review. Her poetry has been featured in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review, and her essays have appeared in Saveur, ColorLines, The Southern Review, Oxford American, Cornbread Nation 4, Gravy, and the Best Food Writing anthology. She is the editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness/McSweeney's).

Audrey has been awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Colony, the Richard Soref Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she's also been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Hewlett Foundation.

Audrey Petty’s fiction was first published in a special issue of Callaloo dedicated to emerging African-American women artists. Her stories have since appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, African American Review, StoryQuarterly, Nimrod International Journal, The Louisville Review, The Massachusetts Review, and they have been anthologized in Gumbo: An Anthology of African American Writing (Doubleday) and In the World, Not of It?: Black Writing From Chicago (Southern Illinois University Press). Her poetry has been featured in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review. 

She is the editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness/McSweeney’s Press) and co-editor of The Long Term (Haymarket Press).

Petty has written about television for ColorLines magazine, and her work about creative writing pedagogy has appeared in  Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom and What We Talk About When We Talk About Creative Writing (Multilingual Matters Press). Her series of essays on family, migration and foodways have appeared in Columbia Journal, The Southern Review,  Saveur, Callaloo, Cornbread Nation 4 (University of Georgia Press), and  Best Food Writing 2006 (Marlowe and Company). She is currently at work on a novel.

Full-text archives for most of these journals are available via JSTOR or Project MUSE (check with your library).