Lynne Barrett

We love independent booksellers! To see some of those where readers have found or ordered Magpies, check out the Publications Page.
If you would like a signed copy, they are available from Books & Books, 305-442-4408.

_Coming up soon: I'll be reading May 31st at Watchung Booksellers in Montclair, NJ.

Thinking about having grown up in NJ, being a "Florida writer," and the many ways characters can connect to place led to this guest blog, "Angles of Belonging," just up at Lisa Romeo Writes.

Just published: An appreciation of the (bad) girls in my short stories, at Like Fire.

I'll be teaching a class focused on ways to productive revision, and be part of a series of panels on Publishing and Marketing at the International Women's Writing Guild Conference at Yale, June 22-26 in New Haven, CT.
To see details about upcoming readings, workshops, and conferences I'll be doing, please go to the Events page.

On March 22nd, I was among the authors who received Gold Medals in the Florida Book Awards at the Florida Heritage Awards Ceremony in Tallahassee.

The awards festivities continued with a banquet at the Florida Library Association Conference in Orlando on April 19th.  The

Learn more about the Florida Book Awards here.

This press release includes some of my thoughts about winning the award.



Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner presenting the Gold Medal in General Fiction, for Magpies.

You can hear my conversation with Ariel Gonzalez on WLRN's Topical Currents by going to the About Lynne page  or download the full show's MP3 here.

Publishers Weekly has  reviewed my collection of short stories, Magpies: "Barrett portrays adult lives with minimal flourishes and a powerful command of setting. Florida is electric with the tension of "all that can happen"—hurricanes, sinkholes, and a boom-and-bust history. It becomes as eerie as it is richly imagined, whether stories take place in an Art Deco building or a gas station. One of the year's finer university press offerings..."

In The Rumpus, Joseph Olshan writes:  "Sentence for sentence, Barrett is a superb writer. Her work brims with original ideas, questions and philosophical musings, the product of a probing intelligence and a highly literate sensibility. But what separates her from many contemporary short fiction writers is her consummate story-telling ability."

Melissa Slayton in the Apalachee Review says, "Fans of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad or Tony Earley’s Here We Are in Paradise will enjoy Lynne Barrett’s third collection of short stories, which won the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for General Fiction. Barrett’s aesthetic blends a wry take on contemporary American culture with a unique awareness of the Florida landscape. Within this book, one is as likely to encounter an overwrought editor as a sink hole, a gossip columnist as a tropical depression....This collection is tightly crafted and yet eclectic.


Emma Trelles says Magpies is "an assemblage of delightfully strange stories" in her New Times list of best things about Miami. And Chauncey Mabe asks "Why does Lynne Barrett hate me?" in his review.

Angela Kelsey has done a four-part (they're short!) interview with me on her blog. Topics covered include how a writer transforms bits of the past,  use of place, how suspense is created in literary stories, and tips for writers.

Necee Regis interviews me (and compares reading the collection to eating Belgian chocolates) at Beyond the Margins.

The book launch at Books & Books in Coral Gables, FL is described in this great blog by Geoffrey Philp.


Casey Pycior interviewed me for his blog, The Story is the Cure. Among other things, we discuss how my story "Links" got inadvertently linked, and then delinked, online, unanticipated consequences of writing about the dot com world.

Laura Richardson interviewed me about Magpies, plot, editing, and much more for Sliver of Stone Magazine.

Magpies is published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
For more about the book, see the Magpies page. And while there, learn about Sterling Mulbry, the artist whose painting is on the cover.

A new story, "Walk-In," was published in Nov. 2012 in Blue Christmas: Holiday Stories for the Rest of us, an anthology edited by John Dufresne. The collection of unsentimental Christmas stories can be purchased online directly from Books & Books' website.

Learn more about this and other stories in anthologies here.

As editor of Tigertail, A South Florida Annual: Florida Flash, I looked for very short prose works to explore the edges and overlaps between lyrical and narrative approaches. Fifty-four authors with connections to Florida contributed prose poetry, flash fiction, and flash nonfiction. "For each piece, editor Lynne Barrett set a maximum of no more than 305 words—a number representing the original South Florida area code as well as the limits of a single page—and the result is an exuberant collection that captures both scintillant moments and the faceted turnings of memory."   

     This Miami New Times interview helps to explain the concept and the range of work included.   And Flavorpill Miami's Ewa Josefsson writes up the issue & the launch.  You can listen to an on-air interview I did with Christine DiMattei on WLRN about the book and the South Florida Flash writing contest the WLRN-Miami Herald News ran, inspired by the collection and the 305 word concept. More about the contest here.  More about the collection, and the radio contest it inspired, on the Works Edited page.

Glimmer Train republished "What Editors Want" in their Bulletin of Sept. 1, 2011. When The Review Review published  "What Editors Want," in April 2011,  it "went viral." As editor Becky Tuch reported in their weekly newsletter: "Over at The Review Review, things have been more than a little insane. For one thing, Lynne Barrett's article... 'What Editors Want...' spread around the globe and back, earning us coverage in the L.A. Times and The New Yorker. Yeah, we were pretty excited."


Florida International University honored me with a 2011 Excellence in Graduate Mentorship Award.  For more on my teaching and my students, Please go to the Teaching Page.