Stories for a world coming apart.

About

Darryl J. Benjamin

Darryl J. Benjamin is a prize-winning writer and educator whose essay “In Praise of the Unsteady Woman” won First Prize in nonfiction in the 2026 Porter Fleming Literary Competition. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, JMWW, Flash Frog, Astrolabe, All Worlds Wayfarer, The Hopper, and The Criterion; “The Art of Falling Water” was a finalist for the 2025 Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, “The Last Recipe That Needed a Forest” is forthcoming in the print edition of The Missouri Review, and he has twice been nominated for Best New American Voices. His craft essay “Framing Catastrophe in the First Two Paragraphs” will appear in CRAFT in October 2026, and his civic commentary has appeared in The Stuart News. He is coauthor of Farm to Table: The Essential Guide to Sustainable Food Systems for Students, Professionals, and Consumers, published by Chelsea Green Publishing, and is developing The Extra Room, a feature screenplay. He has more than a decade of college teaching, including seven years of full-time writing instruction at New England Culinary Institute, where he received the Creative Teaching Award in 2010, and three years of graduate teaching in sustainable food systems at Green Mountain College. He holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BA in English Literature from McGill University. Based in Port St. Lucie, Florida, he has developed and taught courses in creative writing, literature, environmental humanities, food writing, adult education, and interdisciplinary studies.

Recognition

Selected honors

• First Prize, Porter Fleming Literary Competition, 2026
• Finalist, The Missouri Review 2025 Editors’ Prize
• Fiction and nonfiction in The Missouri Review BLAST, Flash Frog, JMWW, and other journals