Associate Teaching Professor Shannon Robinson has been named on the Longlist for the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards. Her book The Ill-Fitting Skin is up for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, which honors an author whose debut collection represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise for future work. The winner will receive a $25,000 cash prize intended to allow significant time and resources with which to pursue subsequent work.

The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize was established in memory of Robert W. Bingham, who died in 1999 at the age of 33, to commemorate his support of young writers, his love of literature, and his contribution to literary fiction.

Shannon Robinson’s debut short story collection, The Ill-Fitting Skin, is winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction (2024). Her writing has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Joyland, Water-Stone Review, Nimrod, failbetter, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis, and in 2011 she was the Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts. Other honors include Nimrod’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts, a Hedgebrook Fellowship, a Sewanee Scholarship, and an Independent Artist Award from the Maryland Arts Council. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with her husband and son.