Fiction Writer
Publications & Prizes
Marina Rubin is a 2013 recipient of COJECO Blueprint Fellowship.
She attended Pace University on a Writing Scholarship from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).
While a student at Pace, she was a three-time recipient of Sarah Willis Creative Writing Award.
Her poetry was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and again in 2012.
Her book of flash fiction "Stealing Cherries" received an Honorable Mention on the list of Best Books of 2014 from Heeb Magazine.
Her short story "Good People Make Bad Couples" was shortlisted for the 2019 Writers' HQ Flash Fiction Prize.
Her new short-story collection "Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions" (Crowsnest Books, 2023) has received an Honorable Mention for the 2020 Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship.
Her short story "Jupiter" was nominated for the Best of the Net 2021.
PRAISE FOR KNOCKOUT BEAUTY AND OTHER AFFLICTIONS:
- In Marina Rubin’s sparkling new collection of stories, Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions, Flora as well as most other women in the book are searching for love—and running from it, too. Rubin’s characters, many of them Jewish, are Americans and émigrés. Her writing is funny, dramatic, compassionate, rich with detail and original. Hadassah Magazine
- In a Nutshell: A knockout beauty of an anthology with hardly any afflictions. Rosh Reviews
- “The stories in “Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions” are well done and offer interesting insights into the characters’ lives. This is Rubin’s second excellent collection, making her a writer to watch.” The Reporter Group
PRAISE FOR STEALING CHERRIES:
- “Like Russian-born novelists Gary Shteyngart, Lara Vapnyar and David Bezmozgis, Marina Rubin mines her immigrant experience for her fiction, uncovering the universal. Her writing is sparse and precise, yet also lush, with long sentences packed full of life, drama and artistry...” Jewish Week
- " For the flash-fiction fan, ADD-suffering reader or David Sedaris admirer: Marina Rubin’s collection of micro-stories, hits all the right notes with its humor, mild perversity and warmth…Poetic, punchy and packed with vignettes, Stealing Cherries will pop your brain...” Coachella Valley Independent
- "The flash stories are a veritable bushel of stolen cherries, each one is a delight to read, sweet and best enjoyed in bunches. A slight bitterness follows, we’re too old to enjoy stolen cherries, too grownup to snatch virgin fruit and eat it with unconscious abandon, but the memory of the taste, and the echoes within these stories are still delightful to carry within us afterwards." Nano Fiction
- "Rubin is a new voice on the scene and her collection of flash fiction was a revelation…Her writing has such a sharp focus that she successfully captures an event and mood in very few words. While these funny, strange, off-beat works are called fiction, the ones written in the first person read like autobiography. Rubin does an excellent job capturing small, sometimes shocking, moments...” The Reporter
- "Marina Rubin writes the shortest short stories around – they’re almost prose poems, each filling a rectangle of text on the page. Her stories in Stealing Cherries burst out of their boxes, as she writes with exuberance about her family’s experience as immigrants from the former Soviet Union and of her own later experiences working, traveling and becoming an American..." Jewish Woman Magazine
- "...its intimate clash of cultures, political and economic antagonisms, and transgressive sexualities are never very far from the surface of these sometimes nostalgic, sometimes bittersweet, often sensual fictions." Urban Graffiti
- “Short and sudden, none longer than a page, these tales are funny and embarrassing and sad and honest. Tradition intersects with cultural displacement as Rubin tells tales of dating mishaps and wardrobe malfunctions. Stealing Cherries is not your typical story of Russian refuseniks—and that’s exactly why we love it…” Jewniverse