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Martha S. Cooley, Ph.D.

Professor Martha S. Cooley was named a recipient of the prestigious for her short fiction “Mercedes Benz.” The story—a meditation on poetry, cars and growing older—originally appeared in the journal , where she is a contributing editor, and will be republished in an anthology with the rest of this year’s winners.

The story follows in setting and tone her recently published memoir Guesswork: A Reckoning With Loss, which followed her through a year in Italy as she reflects on her aging parents and the loss of friends. Writing for , Diane Cole noted that “through evocative imagery and invocations of the poetry of Eliot, Dickinson and Whitman, [Cooley] reminds us that art can bring solace and clarity to the greatest pain.” critic Meghan Daum called the book a “splendid and subtle memoir.” And the Times’ Book Match column called her previous work The Archivist “a layered literary novel about love, grief, mental illness and religion with a middle section told in diary form.”

A translator in addition to a writer and professor, Cooley has worked on the English publication of several volumes of Italian fiction and poetry. She divides her time between New York City and a medieval village in Lunigiana, Italy.