By: Stoyan Vassilev

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"Stoyan Vassilev is a rare, beautiful writer. His fiction is wise and engaging and seasoned with feeling and thought. He is at the nucleus of why we read fiction."—contest judge and acclaimed author Frederic Tuten

"Here are stories from the 'other' Europe, a Europe in the grip of incomprehensible politics and Slavic melancholy. But there is a new development: Hope. Stoyan Alexandrov Vassilev asks us, What should we do with our history? Abandon it? Burn it? Befriend it? Yes to all of these, and also transform it into a book of remarkable stories."—author Robert Glück

Stoyan Vassilev was born in 1979 in Sofia, Bulgaria. He arrived in the USA in 1998. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 2003 and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2005. He is an MFA candidate of creative fiction at San Francisco State University. He was the winner of the New Beginnings Web Contest at Scribophile in 2010, the recipient of the Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship in 2011, and the winner of the Michael Rubin Award in 2012. He lives in Boulder Creek, rural California, with his wife, baby, and two golden retrievers. 

About the Michael Rubin Book Award 

Each year, Fourteen Hills Press publishes the winner of The Michael Rubin Book Award. Alternating years between poetry and fiction, manuscripts are gathered in an open competition and read by an independent judge. The winner must be a student enrolled at SFSU whose work shows exceptional accomplishment and promise. The 2012 Michael Rubin Book, a collection of stories entitled “Hope Seven", was selected by author Frederic Tuten.