Congratulations to Arna Hemenway, who was awarded the 2015 PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award for Debut Fiction for his story collection, Elegy on Kinderklavier. 

Hemenway is an Iowa Writers' Workshop alumnus (2012), and also studied at the University of Iowa as an undergraduate, earning is B.A. in English in 2009. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, The Seattle Review, and Meridian Literary Review, among others, and has been named a Notable/Distinguished Story of the Year in both the Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. He has been the recipient of scholarships or fellowships in fiction writing from the Truman Capote Literary Trust, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Taos Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing at Baylor University.

The PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award is given for a novel or book of short stories by an American author who has not previously published a book of fiction. The late Mary Hemingway founded the award in 1976 both to honor the memory of her husband, Ernest Hemingway, and to recognize distinguished first books of fiction. Past winners of the award include Renata Adler, Marilynne Robinson, Bobbie Ann Mason, Edward P. Jones, Chang-Rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li, Ben Fountain, Teju Cole, and NoViolet Bulawayo.