The 50WS Hall of Fame is a place to celebrate some of the most accomplished authors who have contributed to FiftyWordStories.com over the years. Read on for a list of inductees, including biographies and links to their stories.

List of Inductees
Bob Thurber (January 2015)
Guy Preston (January 2016)
Jennifer L. Freed (January 2017)
Jonathan Kosik (January 2018)
Evan McMurry (January 2019)
N. West Moss (January 2021)
Tim Boiteau (January 2022)

Bob Thurber

Read Bob Thurber’s stories on 50WS

In 1974, at the age of nineteen, Bob Thurber bought an electric typewriter and set out to become a writer.  Despite his lack of education, he worked at writing nearly every day for over twenty years before submitting for publication. He sold his first story at the age of forty-two, then went on to publish hundreds more, along with a stunning first novel and two collections of short fiction. His work has appeared in Esquire and other notable publications, and received a long list of awards and citations, including The Barry Hannah Fiction Prize. Selections have appeared in thirty-six anthologies and been utilized in schools and colleges as teaching tools and as examples of concise prose. He resides in Massachusetts where, though slowed by severe vision loss, he continues to write every day. Visit his website at BobThurber.net.

Bob Thurber became the first inductee into the 50WS Hall of Fame after earning the 2014 Story of the Year prize for his story The Mapmaker’s Calligraphist Daughter, along with two other 2014 Story of the Week awards. In 2018, he added another Story of the Year title for The Summer of Sweet Mary (circa 1972).

Guy Preston

Read Guy Preston’s stories on 50WS

As Guy boarded the plane, his friend nudged him and whispered that the airline had one of the worst safety records in the world.

“But what’s the worst that could happen?” he joked.

One emergency landing later, Guy sat inside a Peruvian airport and started to write his first poem.

In his eighteen month literary career, Guy’s work has been featured on 50-Word Stories and his grandmother’s fridge door. He is currently working on a collection of short stories, and writes almost exclusively with a pen he found in a train station car park. In his spare time, Guy plays songs about cowboys and fighting dragons in the desert.

Guy currently lives in Scarborough, a small English town famous for having the world’s longest train station seat. Contrary to popular belief, he does not own a pet toucan. This is his first 144-Word bio.

Guy Preston became the second inductee into the 50WS Hall of Fame after earning the 2015 Story of the Year prize for his story One Job From Retirement to go with two 2015 Story of the Month awards.

Jennifer L. Freed

Read Jennifer L. Freed’s stories on 50WS

When she was a girl, Jennifer L. Freed wanted to be a novelist.  As a young adult, she wrote long non-fiction pieces based on her experiences as an
English teacher overseas.  Years later, she still asks herself how she became so interested in much briefer forms of writing — poetry and micro-fiction. Maybe that’s all that fit into the bits of time she had when her daughters were born. And maybe that explains why those daughters keep running in and out of so much of what she writes. (She still struggles to fit writing into nooks and crannies of her days.)

Her work has appeared in print literary journals including Poetry East, Off the Coast, The Worcester Review,  and Common Ground Review,  in online journals including Microfiction Monday, A Quiet Courage, and Citron Review, and in a chapbook, These Hands Still Holding (Finishing Line Press, 2014), a finalist for the 2013 New Women’s Voices contest. She lives with her family in Massachusetts. To learn more or to read some of her work, please visit her website: jfreed.weebly.com

Jennifer L. Freed was the 2016 inductee into the 50WS Hall of Fame, earning Story of the Year honours for Aunt Peg. She repeated the achievement in 2020 with her second Story of the Year, Your Pills.

Jonathan Kosik

Read Jonathan Kosik’s stories on 50WS

Jonathan Kosik lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he works on a television show about building cars and trucks with entirely too much horsepower. His wife and daughter like to watch from the window as he works on the deck in their backyard.

You can see more at jonathankosik.com.

Jonathan won the 2017 Story of the Year award for his first contribution to the site, Constellations. In 2023, he followed up his accomplishment with a second Story of the Year win for Desert Blues in a Minor Key.

Evan McMurry

Read Evan McMurry’s stories on 50WS
Evan McMurry’s fiction has been published in more than one dozen journals, including Post Road, Euphony, and more. His story “Nothing Kinky” won the New Millennium Fiction Prize, and his story “Nixon in Heaven” won Exposition Review’s Flash Fiction contest. “The Fall of Rabbi Gold” was selected as a finalist for the Al-Simāk Award for Fiction from the Chicago Review of Books. He graduated from Reed College and received his MFA in fiction from Texas State University-San Marcos. Find him at evanmcmurry.com and on Twitter at @evanmcmurry.

“But tell me, sir, how can you call it a curious and celebrated adventure, when we’ve ended up like this?” –Sancho Panza

Evan contributed the 2019 Story of the Year, After the Water.

N. West Moss

Read N. West Moss’s stories on 50WS
N. West Moss has a memoir out now called Flesh and Blood: Reflections on Infertility, Family, and Creating a Bountiful Life (Algonquin). She has a middle-grade novel forthcoming from Christ Ottaviano at Little, Brown. Her work appears in Brevity, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Miniskirt Magazine, and elsewhere.

You can follow her on Twitter at @scoutandhuck and Instagram at @nwestmoss. She teaches writing in New York City.

West contributed the 2021 Story of the Year, A man (not her husband).

Photo by Thomas Donley

Tim Boiteau

Read Tim Boiteau’s stories on 50WS
Tim Boiteau is the author of two dark fiction novels, The Drummer Girl (Branching Realities, 2020) and Iltday (Fenris, forthcoming). He won a Writers of the Future award for his apocalyptic story “Molting Season” and has published close to one hundred short stories in a range of venues including Daily Science Fiction, Deep Magic, Dream of Shadows, Every Day Fiction, and LampLight Magazine. He has a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina and now resides near the Motor City with his wife and son. He comes up with his best ideas when he’s out jogging. Find him on Twitter @timboiteau and his website.

Tim contributed the 2022 Story of the Year, Cherry Blossom.