This year, our debutantes are: Nini Berndt (There are Reasons for This), Kerry Cullen (House of Beth), Carrie R. Moore (Make Your Way Home), Lucas Schaefer (The Slip), Jackie Thomas-Kennedy (The Other Wife), Lauren K. Watel (Book of Potions), and Julian Zabalbeascoa (What We Tried to Bury Grows Here).

Tickets are on sale now for the Ball, which is happening May 16, 2025, at Roulette in Brooklyn.

In the coming weeks, you can get to know them through a series of interviews conducted by our readers. And we’re thrilled to be partnering with Debutiful for a live virtual reading with all the Debutantes on May 1st at 7pm ET. It’s free, and all are welcome to join. REGISTER HERE.

Read more about these incredible debut authors below!

Nini Berndt, author of OS issue #323, “Empress”

Nini Berndt is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in The Southampton Review, Subtropics, Split Lip, Passages North, and elsewhere. She teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where she lives with her wife and son. Her first novel There Are Reasons for This is forthcoming from Tin House in June 2025.

Kerry Cullen, author of OTS issue #33, “Flight Feathers”

Kerry Cullen’s fiction has been published in The Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, One Teen Story, and more. She earned her MFA at Columbia University, and she lives in New York. House of Beth, her first novel, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in July 2025.

Carrie R. Moore, author of OS issue #283, “Naturale”

Carrie R. Moore’s fiction has appeared in One Story, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and other publications. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Community of Writers, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies. She earned her MFA in Fiction at the Michener Center for Writers, where she won the Keene Prize for Literature and was the inaugural fellow at the Steinbeck Writers’ Retreat in Sag Harbor, New York. Her debut collection of stories, Make Your Way Home, is forthcoming from Tin House Books.

Lucas Schaefer, author of OS issue #225, “An Oral History of the Next Battle of the Sexes”

Lucas Schaefer’s debut novel, The Slip, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on June 3, 2025. His fiction has appeared in One Story, The Baffler, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, author of OS issue #276, “Extinction”

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 2014. She is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and her story “Sledding” was a 2023 Narrative Story of the Week. Her work has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts, and her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, Lenny Letter, Narrative, Bennington Review, The Idaho Review, and elsewhere. Her reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, Harvard Review, the Star Tribune, The Millions, and on the Ploughshares blog. She is a two-time MacDowell fellow and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Ucross Foundation, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the Saltonstall Foundation. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts. Her debut novel, The Other Wife, is forthcoming from Riverhead in summer 2025 and from Viking in the UK.

Lauren K. Watel, author of OS issue #321, “Trampoline”

Lauren K. Watel’s debut book, a collection of prose poetry entitled BOOK of POTIONS (potion = poem + fiction), was awarded the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, from Sarabande Books. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and translations have appeared widely. Watel’s prose poem honoring Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was set to music by Pulitzer-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and the piece premiered at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 2021. A native of Dallas, TX, she lives in Decatur, GA, home of the intrepid Decatur High School Marching Band.

Julian Zabalbeascoa, author of OS issue #286, “A Life Anew”

Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here was published in November 2024 by Two Dollar Radio. Among other journals, his stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Boulevard, The Common, Electric Literature, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, One Story, and Ploughshares. A dual citizen of Spain and the US, he was born and raised in California’s Central Valley. He earned his MFA in Creative Writing in Madrid from the University of New Orleans and taught at various institutions throughout California before moving to Boston, where he now teaches in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and leads annual study abroad programs to Donostia-San Sebastian, Havana, Madrid, and Paris.