Most writers with three National Book Award nominations on the shelf end up in New York. Lauren Groff did the opposite. She came to Gainesville in 2006 knowing nobody, built one of the most decorated careers in American fiction from a house in Alachua County, and then, when the state started making it easy to pull books off school shelves, she opened a bookstore downtown and dared anyone to stop her.
Her new collection, Brawler, came out in February. The title is not a metaphor she picked at random.
Meet Lauren Groff
Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, studied English and French at Amherst College, and earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then, in 2006, she moved to Florida. She has said she knew no one here, and that the isolation is part of what let her finish her first few books. Two decades later she has told Flamingo magazine that Florida gave her her literary life, even if she expects to always feel a little like an outsider in it.
The career that followed is the kind most of us only read about. The Monsters of Templeton (2008) was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Fates and Furies (2015), Florida (2018), and Matrix (2021) were each National Book Award finalists. Florida won The Story Prize. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018, and in 2024 Time named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Her most recent novel, The Vaster Wilds (2023), follows a servant girl fleeing a starving colonial settlement into the American wilderness.
And then there is the bookstore. In the spring of 2023, during a fellowship in Berlin, Groff watched from a distance as Florida made it simple for almost anyone to challenge a book in a public school. Her German hosts, she has said, pushed her to do something about it. She and her husband, Clay Kallman, came home that summer, found a storefront, got the keys in January 2024, and opened The Lynx in downtown Gainesville by the end of April. Its affiliated nonprofit, The Lynx Watch, gets challenged and banned books into the hands of Florida readers. If you have not been, go. It is a working independent bookstore run by a working writer, and that is rarer than it should be.
The Latest Release: Brawler
Released February 24, 2026 by Riverhead Books, Brawler is Groff’s third story collection and her first since Florida. It went straight onto the New York Times bestseller list.
Nine stories, ranging from the 1950s to the present and from New England to Florida to California. The publisher’s line on them is that they share a single theme, the fight between what one character calls the animal and the god wrestling inside every person. The people caught in that fight include a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer who badly needs an adult, a mother undone by the loss of her family, and a banking heir who inherits something other than money.
Florida readers will want to look for “To Sunland,” which visits a fictional state psychiatric facility modeled on Florida’s real state-run hospitals. The collection opens with “The Wind” and closes with “Annunciation,” and Groff has said she chose and ordered the stories so that the book makes a larger statement than any one of them does alone. She also told One Story that she did not realize the collection was mostly about women until readers pointed it out to her.
The Boston Globe’s reviewer wrote that the book “wallops its reader with ferocious honesty and searing emotional force.” That is about right. These are not comfortable stories. They are, however, very good ones, and several of them are ours.
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Where to Start With Lauren Groff
If you want Florida on the page: Florida (2018). Eleven stories, most of them set here, full of snakes, sinkholes, hurricanes, and women thinking hard in the heat. It won The Story Prize and it is the book most of her neighbors start with.
If you want the big one: Fates and Furies (2015). A marriage told twice, first from his side and then from hers. The second half rewrites the first.
If you want history: Matrix (2021), the story of a twelfth-century nun who turns a failing abbey into a fortress, or The Vaster Wilds (2023), a girl alone in the colonial wilderness with winter coming.
If you want the beginning: The Monsters of Templeton (2008), her debut, set in a thinly disguised Cooperstown, complete with a lake monster.
If you want more stories: Arcadia (2012) is the novel about a boy raised on a commune, and Delicate Edible Birds (2009) is the first collection.
In Her Own Words
Groff talked with Hannah Tinti of One Story in April 2026 about the difference between the two forms she works in. Novels, she said, are “loose, baggy monsters.” A story is closer to a poem; its structure has to be exact or it does not feel finished. Novels play in a major chord, stories in a minor one.
Asked what advice she would give the writer she was in 2008, the year her first book came out, she said: “Make glorious mistakes. Make yourself laugh.” And on craft in general: “Like any other art, it’s about practice and beautiful failure until we build an inner sense of what’s right.”
For the writers in our audience, that is the whole workshop in three sentences.
Get in Touch With the Author
Author Website: laurengroff.com
The Lynx Bookstore: thelynxbooks.com
Instagram: @legroff
Goodreads: Lauren Groff
Directory Listing: North Florida Writers G and H
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