The winners of the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Awards are Marie-Helene Bertino and Chad Simpson. Bertino won the 2012 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection Safe as Houses, and Simpson's Tell Everyone I Said Hi is the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award.

The recipients were selected by Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad: Stories. The collections will be published by the UI Press this fall.

A graduate of Brooklyn College, Bertino received a Pushcart prize in 2007 and a Pushcart Special Mention in 2011, which is also the year she was chosen as a Center for Fiction NYC Emerging Writer's Fellow.

Simpson is the recipient of a fellowship in prose from the Illinois Arts Council and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences. He received an MFA from Southern Illinois University, and he teaches at Knox College, where he received the Philip Green Wright/Lombard College Prize for Distinguished Teaching in 2010.

The short fiction awards are given to a first collection of fiction in English and are administered through the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Learn more at www.uiowapress.org/new-and-noteworthy/02-03-2012/2012-iowa-short-fiction-award-winners-announced.