We are very, very proud…

...of upstreet’s Fiction Editor, Robin Oliveira, who has just won the 15th annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship. This $10,000 Fellowship, awarded to an American author of a first novel-in-progress by the James Jones Literary Society and Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA, is intended to honor the spirit of unblinking honesty, determination, and insight into modern culture exemplified by the late James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, Some Came Running, and other prose narratives.

Robin Oliveira was born in Albany, NY, in 1954. She earned a BA in Russian from the University of Montana and continued to study at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow, USSR. She became a Registered Nurse, and then worked as a bone marrow transplant and cardiac care nurse in Seattle before earning an MFA in writing from Vermont College in 2006. Besides being Fiction Editor for upstreet, she is an assistant editor at Narrative Magazine. She lives in Seattle with her husband, Andrew Oliveira, their daughter, Noelle, and their son, Miles.

Robin’s novel-in-progress, The Last Beautiful Day, follows the story of Mary Sutter, a midwife at the time of the Civil War, whose desire to become a physician is hindered by tradition, the war, and family entanglements.