Amina Gautier's The Loss of All Lost Things is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. When this collection won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award, contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: "Literary fiction that grips us and won't let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives… that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon….Gautier's stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy." Amina Gautier is the author of two other award-winning short story collections: At-Risk and Now We Will Be Happy. At-Risk" was awarded the Flannery O'Connor Award, The First Horizon Award, and the Eric Hoffer Legacy Fiction Award. "Now We Will Be Happy" was awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, the Florida Authors and Publishers Association President's Book Award, and the USA Best Book Award. Gautier has been the recipient of grants and fellowships from Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Key West Literary Seminars, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Ragdale Foundation, among others. Gautier was born and raised in New York, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught creative writing and African American literature at Marquette University, St. Joseph's University, Washington University in St. Louis, and DePaul University. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Miami, and divides her time between Chicago and Miami.
