Photo credit: Aaron Mayes / UNLV Photo Services
Olivia Clare Friedman is a fiction writer and poet. She is the author of four books, most recently the book of poems An Arm Fixed to a Wing (2025) from LSU Press. She is also the author of the novel Here Lies (Grove Atlantic), the short story collection Disasters in the First World (Black Cat/Grove Atlantic), and the book of poems The 26-Hour Day
(New Issues).
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In fiction, she is a recipient of an O. Henry Prize,
a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, The American Scholar, and elsewhere. Her novel Here Lies was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and won the 2022 Foreword Reviews INDIES Bronze Award. Here Lies was also a 2022 Great Reads Selection by the Women's National Book Association and was longlisted for The Crook's Corner Book Prize, a prize for best debut novel set in the American South.
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In poetry, she is a recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University. Friedman's poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Southern Review, and other journals.
She has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Tin House. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from the UNLV Black Mountain Institute.
Friedman grew up in Louisiana. She is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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