About Brandon

My fiction, essays, reviews and interviews have been featured in storySouth, Fiction Writer's Review, Fiction Advocate and others. I am a recipient of an Exceptional Manuscript scholarship from Sierra Nevada College, and have also won scholarships from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance and Slice Magazine. In 2015, I was a finalist in the Slice Magazine Bridging the Gap Competition, as well as a nominee for the storySouth Million Writers Award.
In August, I will receive my MFA in fiction from Sierra Nevada College, where I studied with writers such as Alan Heathcock, Rebecca Makkai, Mike McCormack, Ben Percy, Christian Kiefer, and editor Steven Woodward. Though I originally intended to craft a story collection for my final thesis, it ended up morphing into a novel, tentatively titled Mallows Bay. The novel follows the lives of three brothers, a family of bootleggers, coming of age in 1930s Maryland. It was greatly influenced by the work of writers such as Daniel Woodrell, Jeffrey Eugenides, Anthony Doerr, Jodi Angel, and others.
Aesthetically, I like my fiction to be beautifully written but never forgetting its first purpose is to tell a story. Toss in a little grit--in the vein of Annie Proulx, Flannery O'Connor, or Richard Ford--and it's perfect. And perhaps it's because I spend my days teaching high schoolers, but authors who can illuminate the teenage experience always excite me, like Pamel Erens' The Virgins, or Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides, or Junot Diaz's Drown or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. ​

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