PAMELA PAINTER is the author of five story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know, Ways to Spend the Night, and Fabrications: New and Selected Stories. She is also the co-author with Anne Bernays of the widely-used textbook, now in its third college edition, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, now in its third college edition.
Her stories have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Five Points, Flash Boulevard, Harper’s, Matter Press, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Three Penny Review, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, From Blues to Bop: A Collection of Jazz Fiction, Four Minute Fictions, Flash Fiction Forward, MicroFiction, Nothing Short of 100, Latex, Love Stories for Our Time, New Micro and Flash Fiction America. Her story “Close to Home” was chosen by George Garrett for his Intro series, and gave the title to that year’s collection.
Painter has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction and four Pushcart Prizes. Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on stage by Stage Turner and Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre.
Painter’s stories have also been performed three times by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre in New York City. The first time was in association with the NYU Tisch School of the Arts where two stories were read by actors Connor Paolo and Michael Zegan, along with a story by Anthony Doerr. Her second appearance at WordTheatre was in 2023 at The Players where her story “Your Letter in an Envelope in the Mail” was read. In 2025, her Pushcart Prize winning story, “Just This”, first published in Alaska Quarterly Review, was read by Actor Cassidy Freeman and feature along with Jill McCorkle’s story, “Old Crimes” —again at The Players in New York City with Q & A moderated by A.M.Homes.
Painter’s Pushcart Prize story, “Grief,” was included on a CD titled Love Hurts. Two stories, “God” and “Office at Night” also appear on well-known artist Anthony Russo’s YouTube channel CRONOGEO.
Painter was one of three founding editors of the print literary journal, StoryQuarterly, whose first issues included the work of such well known writers as Janet Burroway, Doris Betts, Stephen Dixon, Gail Godwin, Henry H. Roth, Lore Segal and Thomas Williams, in addition to new writers. She continued to edit the first eleven issues of SQ, and guest-edited issues seventeen and thirty-three. StoryQuarterly now resides at Rutgers University.
Beginning in the late 80s, Painter was perhaps the first writer to teach a workshop entirely devoted to the short short story at Emerson College in Boston. Many of her students have published stories, won flash fiction awards and become publishers themselves of flash fiction—two examples are Rose Metal Press and Quick Fiction. Painter wrote the Afterword for Rose Metal Press’s Brevity and Echo: An Anthology of Short Short Stories made up of the work of Emerson students whose stories had been published and/or won awards in the real world of flash.
Painter is one of five Founding Donors of the Flash Fiction Archive, established at the Harry Ransom Center at UC Austin, Texas. She donated holdings from her collection of the work of Kathy Fish, Diane Williams, Laura Van den Berg, among other flash writers.
Painter’s new collection of stories, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2020.