Corinne Demas is the author of two collections of short stories, three novels, a memoir, a collection of poetry, a play, and numerous books for children. She is Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and a fiction editor of the Massachusetts Review.
Her latest project is the young adult fiction novel
Everything I Was, coming out in April, 2011.
Here are some of my book picks--
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, John Updike's collection Problems and other Stories, Eudora Welty's wise and sweet One Writer's Beginnings, Katherine Mansfield's Selected Short Stories , and Anton Chekhov's Short Stories are some of the books I use in my short story writing seminar-- I've read them many times, and still find them filled with riches.
A prolific and brilliant contemporary short story writer everyone 
should read is William Trevor. I'd recommend any single collection of his or The Collected Stories. I just got his just-published, Selected Stories, which aren't stories 
selected from The Collected Stories, but in fact, all new ones.
