The Baltic Writing Residency in Latvia was founded in 2008 in an effort to nurture the literary arts by offering talented individuals both a comfortable and rich cultural environment in which to immerse themselves, and a substantial amount of time in which to begin or further significant projects. Thus, each year, a single poet, playwright, or writer of fiction is offered a month-long residency at the gorgeous Hotel Bergs in historic Riga.

Congratulations to Salvatore Scibona, who has been awarded a 2012 PEN/O. Henry Prize for his short story, "The Woman Who Lived in the House", written on his Baltic Residency, and which first appeared in A Public Space, and will be included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012 (Coming in April 2012 from Anchor Books).

Joshua Cohen lives in New York City. His trio of novellas, Emission, will be published by Graywolf in 2012. He is the author of 800-page story of the Last Jew, Witz, named one of the 10 best books of 2010 by the Village Voice, and described by the New York Times as "a brave and artful attempt to explore and explode the limits of the sentence". READ MORE >>