A. Muia

A. Muia is the 2024 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her novel in linked stories, A Desert Between Two Seas (published with the University of Georgia Press). Her stories and articles have appeared in The Baltimore Review, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago Review, Faultline, Image Journal, Raleigh Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Water~Stone Review, West Branch, AWP’s The Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in The Orison Anthology and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

For many years she served as a chaplain in the Skagit County Jail and as an advocate for Mexican immigrant farm workers. Currently she facilitates writing workshops with youth in juvenile detention through the nonprofit Underground Writing, and is the co-founder of New Earth Recovery, a nonprofit providing a residential program to people recovering from substance use disorder.

She holds a degree in Spanish language, a master’s in teaching English to speakers of other languages, a post-graduate certificate in Writing Literary Fiction from the University of Washington, and an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University. Though she loves the desert, she lives in rainy Washington State.