Paul Griffiths is an award-winning short story writer and graduate of the Boston University Creative Writing Program. His fiction blends satire, dread, formal experimentation, and emotional pressure, often following people who believe they understand the story they are in — until love, shame, jealousy, or grief reveals otherwise. A work-scholar recipient at Bread Loaf, resident at Kaatsbaan Cultural Park, and selected for a Sue-Je Lee Gage Residency for Human Rights and Social Justice, his prior works have appeared in Story Quarterly, Forklift Ohio, and the Sarah Lawrence Review.
His stories move through ghost tours gone awry, inane corporate presentations, bad love, bad friends, failing family fortunes, shaky romantic gestures, and people who mistake control, passion, or talent for virtue. Across the work, Paul is drawn to memory, power, shame, inheritance, and the tragi-comic machinery of self-justification.
WINNER! Imagine Little Tokyo Contest 2026
A liability letter becomes a supernatural reckoning with Little Tokyo history, bureaucracy, broken agreements, and a ghost tour operated by a literal ghost.
A small loan between old high school friends curdles into obsession, class resentment, nostalgia, and humiliation.
A bodyguard confesses to a billionaire father after his son goes missing from a sketchy plant-medicine retreat.
A corporate slide deck’s speaker notes reveal a father coaching his son through a depraved corporate restructuring pitch.
A woman steals her boyfriend's body of work as a romantic gesture.
Haunted by his dead wife and fading fame, a legendary magician embarks on one final tour in search of an impossible escape.
The world's most famous wizard attempts therapy in middle age.
A sociologist documents her online dating life as a research project.
A horror movie franchise villian is instructed what to do by its fandom.
A Greek island is overrun with the gods of Silicon Valley.
The real housewives of Noah's Ark let loose.
Published in Story Quarterly 41
Paul is currently working on a collection of stories about longing, performance, bad bargains, inherited damage, and the private myths people build around their lives — especially when those myths begin to collapse.