Steve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He has won two Pushcart Prizes, an O’Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book Award. For 30 years, Stern taught at Skidmore College, the majority of those years as Writer-in-Residence.