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Experience a place where partnerships with other programs acknowledge excellence in writing through residency awards.

Jentel Foundation Partners with O. Henry Prize Stories Winners
In 2003 the Jentel Foundation with the collaboration of Anchor Books began to award up to three Jentel Foundation O. Henry residencies a year to writers in the prestigious O. Henry Prize Stories, the annual collection of the best short stories written in English and published in North American magazines.

From the more than one thousand short stories submitted by magazine editors throughout the year, novelist and short story writer Laura Furman chooses twenty winners that stand out above the rest and up to fifteen additional pieces highlighted in the collection as the list of recommended stories, each one a pleasure to read today, each one a potential classic. The O. Henry Prize Stories 2003 also contained brief essays from each of the three distinguished jurors on their favorite story, and comments from the prize-winning writers on what inspired their stories.   

Since its establishment in 1919, the O. Henry Prize Stories collection has offered an exciting selection of the best stories published in hundreds of literary magazines every year. The collections include such classic works of American literature as Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" (1927); William Faulkner's "Barn Burning" (1939); Carson McCullers' "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud" (1943); Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1949); J.D. Salinger's "For Esmé--with Love and Squalor" (1963); John Cheever's "The Country Husband" (1956); and Flannery O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1963) were all O. Henry Prize Stories. 

The connection the residency confirms is an old one: Neltje, founder of Jentel, is the granddaughter of Frank Nelson Doubleday, whose firm first published The O.Henry Prize Stories almost from its establishment in 1919 (The current publisher of the collection, Anchor Books, was formerly a division of Doubleday). Jentel's wish to include O.Henry writers among its residents is a generous recognition of the collection’s long history and, of course, the talent and achievement of the O.Henry prize winners.

In April 2009 the Anchor Books imprint of Random House announced that it had partnered with the literary and human rights organization the PEN American Center and that it would rename its annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.

PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories Residents