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2012 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Rachel Yoder of Iowa City, IA for “The blood was the mountain and the mountain was the bear”
Yoder earned an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work has appeared in Bat City Review, Hobart, The Rumpus, and The Sun, among many others. She is a founding editor of draft: the journal of process and serves as Senior Editor for Defunct Magazine. Visit her online at racheljyoder.com
Finalists:
Cara Adams of Baton Rouge, LA, for “The Sea Latch”
Adams’s work has appeared in many journals, including Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, and The Sun. She serves as fiction and non-fiction editor of The Southern Review.
Jennifer S. Davis of Baton Rouge, LA, for “The Winnowing of Henry Jenkins”
Davis is the author of two story collections, Her Kind of Want (Iowa Prize for Short Fiction, 2002) and Our Former Lives in Art (Random House, 2007), which was selected by Barnes and Noble for their Discover Great New Writers series. Her stories have been published in such journals as The Paris Review, One Story, and Oxford American.
Emma Törzs of Missoula, MT for “Patchwork Elephant”
Törzs received her MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Narrative Magazine, Hobart, and Ploughshares, among many others. Visit her online at emmaemmaemma.com
Poetry
Winner:
Katie Bickham of Shreveport, LA
Bickham is a student in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Maine.
Finalists:
Andrew P. Grace of Gambier, OH
Grace is the author of four books of poetry, most recently the book-length poem Sancta (Ahsahta Press, 2012). He is currently pursuing his doctorate degree at the University of Cincinnati. Visit him online at andrewpgrace.com
Dan O’Brien of Santa Monica, CA
O’Brien’s poetry and fiction have appeared in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. His play about war reporter Paul Watson, The Body of an American, is the winner of the 2011 L. Arnold Weissberger Award and premiered at Portland Center Stage in 2012. He has served as a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the inaugural Djerassi Fellow in Playwriting at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and twice as the Tennessee Williams Playwright-in-residence at Sewanee.
Diane K. Seuss of Kalamazoo, MI
Seuss is Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at Kalamazoo College. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Blackbird, North American Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among many others. Her latest collection of poetry is Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), which received the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry.
Essay
Winner:
Terry Ann Thaxton of Winter Springs, FL, for “Delusions of Grandeur”
Thaxton is the author of the poetry collection Getaway Girl (Salt Publishing, 2011). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Rattle, Connecticut Review, Comstock Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and West Branch, among many others. She is Associate Professor of English at UCF where she founded and directs the Literary Arts Partnership. Visit her online at terryannthaxton.com
Finalists:
Jennifer Anderson of Lewiston, ID for “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie”
Anderson teaches English at Lewis-Clark State College. Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Open Spaces Quarterly, and Cimarron Review.
Kathleen Spivack of Watertown, MA, for “Write What You Know”
Spivack is the author of eight books, most recently With Robert Lowell and His Circle (University Press of New England, 2012)Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and The Paris Review, among many others. Visit her online at kathleenspivack.com
Brad Wetherell of Ann Arbor, MI, for “A Clean Break”
Wetherell teaches at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Berkeley Fiction Review, Fiction Writers Review and Eclectica. He is currently working on a novel.
2011 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Yuko Sakata of Madison, WI for “Unintended”
Sakata is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and has previously won the August Derleth Prize and a MacDowell Fellowship. Sakata also is a dancer and translator. “Unintended” is her first published story.
Finalists:
Jessica F. Kane of New York, NY, for “The Essentials of Acceleration”
Kane is the author of the short story collection, Bending Heaven (Counterpoint, 2002), and a novel, The Report (Graywolf Press, 2010). Her stories have been presented on BBC Radio 4 and published in Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, Narrative, and Granta.com. A new short story collection is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in January 2013. Visit her online at jessicafranciskane.com
Thomas Pierce of Charlottesville, VA, for “Grasshopper Kings”
Pierce grew up in South Carolina. He is currently a Henry Hoyns/Poe-Faulkner Fellow in the MFA fiction program at the University of Virginia, where he is working on a collection of short stories.
Bart Skarzynski of Columbus, OH for “Project X”
Skarzynski was born in Poland and raised in Montreal. For the past sixteen years, he’s been living, studying and working in the United States. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Ohio State University. “Project X” is his first published story.
Poetry
Winner:
David Kirby of Tallahassee, FL
Kirby has most recently published a book of poetry titled “Talking About Movies with Jesus.” He has published other books of poetry as well and was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is a professor of English at Florida State University. Visit him online at davidkirby.com
Finalists:
Steve Gehrke of Reno, NV
Steve Gehrke’s third book of poetry, Michelangelo’s Seizure, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published in 2007. His second book, The Pyramids of Malpighi, won the Philip Levine Prize. He teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman of Madison, WI
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Sightseer, winner of the 2010 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in Fence, Open City, Crab Orchard Review, and Best New Poets 2005, and has appeared as an intro feature in Pleiades and as a featured chapbook in Mid-American Review. She works at an electrical engineering firm in Madison, WI, where she lives with her husband and daughter. Visit her online at cynthiamariehoffman.com
Mark Wunderlich of Catskill, NY
Wunderlich is the author of two collections of poetry: The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999) and Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004). He is currently a professor of literature at Bennington College, where he has taught since 2004. His third collection, The Earth Avails, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. He lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley.
Essay
Winner:
Peter Selgin of Winter Park, FL, for “The Kuhreihen Melody”
Selgin recently completed a novel, “The Water Master,” which won the Pirate’s Alley/William Faulkner Society Award for best novel. He teaches at Antioch University and is also a visiting professor of creative writing at Rollins College. Visit him online at peterselgin.com
Finalists:
May-Lee Chai of San Francisco, CA, for “The Blue Boot”
Chai is the author of six books and a recipient of an NEA grant for Literature. In addition to her books, she has published numerous short stories and essays in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Zyzzyva, The Jakarta Post Weekender Magazine, The North American Review, the Missouri Review, and Seventeen. Visit her online at may-leechai.com
Mako Yoshikawa of Cambridge, MA, for “My Father’s Women”
Yoshikawa’s is the author of two novels: One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed. She attended Columbia University, received a Masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She lives in the Boston area and is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College. Visit her online at makoyoshikawa.com
Dave Zoby of Casper, WY, for “Leftovers, 1993”
Zoby has published poems in 64 Magazine, The New Virginia Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Georgia State Review, Blackbird, South Dakota Review, and others. Currently, he is the chair of the English Department at Casper College.
2010 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Anna Solomon of Providence, Rhode Island for her story “The Long Net”
Solomon’s first novel, The Little Bride, has just been released by Riverhead. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Georgia Review, One Story, Harvard Review, Shenandoah, The Puschart Prize XXXII Anthology and elsewhere. Visit her online at annasolomon.com
Finalists:
Jennifer DuBois of Palo Alto, California for her story “The City of the Dead”
duBois is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a 2009-2011 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Playboy, The Kenyon Review, The Florida Review, The South Carolina Review, and Northwest Review. Her fisrt novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, will be published by Random House in spring 2012. Visit her online at jennifer-dubois.com
Erin Flanagan of Dayton, Ohio for her story “The Wrong Man”
Flanagan is the author of the short story collection The Usual Mistakes, published as part of the Flyover Fiction Series by the University of Nebraska Press. She is an associate professor at Wright State University.
Poetry
Winner:
George Looney of Erie, Pennsylvania
Looney’s most recent book is Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010). His A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness is due from Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2011. His work has been recognized with an individual artist’s fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two grants from the Ohio Arts Council, and one from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He teaches at Penn State Erie, where he is editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect.
Finalists:
Nadine Meyer of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Meyer’s first book of poems, The Anatomy Theater, won the National Poetry Series and was published by HarperCollins in 2006. Her poems have won the New Letters Prize for Poetry as well as a Pushcart Prize. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Southern Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and Boulevard.
Diane Seuss of Kalamazoo, MI
Seuss’s most recent collection of poems, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, was the recipient of the 2009 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Blackbird. She is writer-in-residence at Kalamazoo College.
Josh Booton of Austin, TX
Booton is a James A. Michener Fellow in poetry at the University of Texas-Austin. His poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Poetry Northwest, and the Grove Review. He works as a pediatric speech-language pathologist.
Essay
Winner:
John Hales of Fresno, California for his essay “Helpline”
Hales is the author of Shooting Polaris: A Personal Survey in the American West (University of Missouri Press) and his essays have appeared in journals and anthologies including the Georgia Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Ascent and On Nature: Great Writers on the Great Outdoors. His writing has been cited numerous times in Best American Essays and Best American Science and Nature Writing. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno.
Finalists:
Peter Selgin of Canton, New York for his essay “Titanic Obsessions”
Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction, and Life Goes to the Movies, a novel, as well as two books on writing craft, By Cunning & Craftand 179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers, just out from Writers Digest Books. Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, a memoir in essays whose title essay was included in Best American Essays 2006, will be published by University of Iowa Press/Sightline Books in 2011. He is currently Viebranz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at St. Lawrence University. Visit him online at peterselgin.com
Doug Hunt of Columbia, Missouri for his essay “Names”
Hunt’s work was recognized with the Richard J. Margolis Award, given annually to a “journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice.” His essay on the 1923 lynching of James Scott was listed as “notable” in Best American Essays for 2004.
Molly Schultz of Moscow, Idaho for her essay “On Loneliness”
Schultz is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing at the University of Idaho. Her essay “Litany of My Mother” won the 2010 prize for nonfiction from Black Warrior Review. Her work has also appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly. Schultz is a native of Chicago.
2009 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Fiona McFarlane of Austin, Texas for her story “Exotic Animal Medicine”
McFarlane was born in Sydney, Australia. She has a BA from Sydney University and a PhD from Cambridge University and is currently an MFA candidate at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown and Phillips Exeter Academy. Her work has been published in Zoetrope: All-Story, Island and Southerly.
Finalists:
Diane Simmons of New York, New York for her story “Yukon River”
Diane Simmons has published short fiction in numerous journals, including Northwest Review, Fiction, Green Mountains Review and Blood Orange Review with new work forthcoming in Beloit Fiction Journal. Her novel, Dreams Like Thunder (Story Line Press) won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction.
Mai-Lee Chai of San Francisco, California for her story “Tomorrow in Shanghai”
Chai is the author of six books and a recipient of an NEA grant for Literature. While climbing mountains looking for Buddhist statues and temples, she first learned of China’s rural AIDS crisis. As a result, she began writing her new novel, The Blood Merchant, which is based on characters from “Tomorrow in Shanghai.”
Siobhan Fallon of Monterey, California for her story “Remission”
Fallon lived at Fort Hood while her husband was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty. She earned her MFA at the New School in New York City and now lives with her family near the American Embassy in Amman, Jordan. Visit her online at siobhanfallon.com
Poetry
Winner:
Christina Hutchins of Albany, California
Hutchins’s work appears in Alehouse, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, the Southern Review and Women’s Review of Books. She has received two Barbara Deming Poetry Awards and won the Villa Montalvo Poetry Prize. Sixteen Rivers Press will publish The Stranger Dissolves in early 2011. She is the Poet Laureate of Albany, California.
Finalists:
Sarah Blackman of Greenville, South Carolina
Blackman is the director of creative writing at the Fine Arts Center, a public arts high school in Greenville, South Carolina. Her writing has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Versal and Forklift, Ohio among others. Her fiction chapbook Such a Thing as America is available from the Burnside Review.
Joseph Fasano of Middletown, New York
Fasano’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, RATTLE, The Western Humanities Review, and other journals. He won the 2008 RATTLE Poetry Prize, he was a runner-up in the 2008 Times Literary Supplement Poetry Competition, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Brian Brodeur of Fairfax, Virginia
Brodeur is the author of Other Latitudes (2008), winner of the University of Akron Press’s 2007 Akron Poetry Prize, and So the Night Cannot Go on Without Us (2007), which won the Fall 2006 White Eagle Coffee Store Poetry Chapbook Award. Recent poems and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Many Mountains Moving, Margie and others. He also maintains the blog “How a Poem Happens.”
Essay
Winner:
Joseph Murtagh of Trumansberg, New York for his essay “A Hive of Mysterious Danger”
Murtagh received his PhD in English from Cornell University in August 2009. He currently teaches at Ithaca College. He was the winner of the 2004 Creative Nonfiction Award from the Mid-American Review. From May 2008 to September 2009 he worked as an organizer for the Working Families Party, with whom he assisted in the 2008 Democratic takeover of the New York State Senate, an experience he’s writing about in a book project titled Campaign Days.
Finalists:
Jonathan Starke of Fort Collins, Colorado for his essay “What Happens to Heroes”
Starke is a native of Iowa and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he is working toward an MFA in creative writing at Colorado State University. He has an essay appearing in Fourth Genre and is currently working on a memoir about bodybuilding, a collection of short stories and a collection of personal essays.
Rachel Riederer of Brooklyn, New York for her essay “Patient”
Riederer teaches academic writing at Columbia University, where she was the 2008-2009 nonfiction editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She is a contributor to the science section of The Faster Times and is at work on a book about the environmental disasters and management of Lake Victoria, the world’s largest tropical lake and source of the White Nile.
David Bahr of New York, New York for his essay “Bootstrapped”
Bahr’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Book Review, GQ, The Village Voice, New York, Spin, Time Out New York, Poets & Writers, Publishers’ Weekly, The Advocate and other publications. An autobiographical essay, “No Matter What Happens,” appears in the anthology From Boys To Men (Carroll & Graf; 2006), an earlier published version of which was cited by Bob Atwan, series editor of Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin), as a notable essay of 2004. He has an MA in English, teaches literature at The City University of New York and has been a writing fellow at Yaddo.
2008 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Roy Kesey of North Syracuse, New York for his story “Double Fish.”
Kesey is the author of three books: a novella, Nothing in the World (Dzanc Books); a story collection, All Over (Dzanc Books); and Nanjing: A Cultural and Historical Guide for Travelers (Atomic Press). His work has appeared in more than sixty magazines and in several anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology, and New Sudden Fiction. Visit him online at roykesey.com
Finalists:
Jennifer Arnspiger of San Diego, California for her story “Foie Gras”
Mike Murray of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for his story “The Underwater Man”
Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner of Concrete, Washington for his story “Jack and His Disappearing Act”
Van Wagoner’s first novel, Dancing Naked (Signature Books, 1999), was awarded the Utah Center for the Book’s Utah Book Award and the Utah Arts Council’s Publication Prize. His short stories have appeared in literary periodicals and anthologies, including The Best of Writers at Work and In Our Lovely Deseret, and have been selected for various awards, including Carolina Quarterly’s Charles B. Wood Award for Distinguished Writing, Shenandoah’s Jeanne Charpiot Goodheart Award for Fiction, Sunstone’s Brookie and D.K. Brown Memorial Fiction Award, and Weber Studies’ Dr. O. Marvin Lewis Award for Best Fiction, 1994-1997.
Poetry
Winner:
Frannie Lindsay of Belmont, Massachusetts
Lindsay is the author of three collections of poetry: Mayweed (The Word Works, 2009); Lamb (Perugia Press, 2006); and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Field, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, Harvard Review, Poetry East, Tampa Review, Hunger Mountain, and many other journals. She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also a classical pianist. Visit her online at frannielindsay.com
Finalists:
Matthew Fluharty of St. Louis, Missouri
Jennifer Grotz of Greensboro, North Carolina
Christina Hutchins of Albany, California
Nonfiction
Winner:
Deborah Thompson of Fort Collins, Colorado for her essay “What’s the Matter with Houdini”
Thompson is an associate professor of English at Colorado State University and a member of the Slow Sand Writers Society, whose members she wishes to thank for their help with this essay. Living in the foothills of Colorado, she now shares her home with four dogs and a cat.
Finalists:
Gail Kezer Lowe of Brunswick, Maine for her essay “Around the Rosy”
David MacLean of Houston, Texas for his essay “The Answer to the Riddle is Me”
Robert Rebein of Indianapolis, Indiana for his essay “The Sisyphus of the Plains”
2007 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Otis Haschemeyer of Knoxville, TN for his story “The Fantome of Fatma”
Finalists:
Anna Solomon of New York, NY for her story “The Lobster Mafia Story”
Cynthia Morrison Phoel of Newton Highlands, MA for “Never Trust a Man Who . . .”
Natalie Sears of New York, NY for her story “Arctic Summer”
Poetry
Winner:
Jude Nutter of Edina, MN
Finalists:
Christina Hutchins of Albany, CA
Paisley Rekdal of Salt Lake City, UT
Scott Coffel of Iowa City, IA
Nonfiction
Winner:
Robert Kimber of Temple, ME for his essay “Big Jim”
Finalists:
Anne Meisenzahl of Tallahassee, FL for her essay “Thank You and Good-bye: A Meditation on My Breasts”
Elizabeth Logan Harris of New York, NY for her essay “How Come?”
John Stazinksi of Cambridge, MA for his essay “Lesson in Amateur Stalking”
2006 Contest Winners
Fiction
Winner:
Jacob M. Appel of New York, NY for his story “Creve Coeur”
Finalists:
Jennine Capó Crucet of Champaign, IL for her story “And in the Morning, Work”
Erica Debeljak of Evanston, IL for her story “Biology”
Elliott Holt of Brooklyn, NY for his story “Fem Care”
Poetry
Winner:
Jonathan Fink of Pensacola, FL
Finalists:
Adam Day of Brooklyn, NY
Ann Fisher-Wirth of Oxford, MS
Jane Springer of Tallahassee, FL
Nonfiction
Winner:
Cynthia Coffel of Iowa City, IA for her essay “Letters to David”
Finalists:
Tom Carlson of Memphis, TN for his essay “Mr. Tilley and his Twin (Neon Brothers) Wink and Grin”
John Fanestil for his essay “The Freying of the Memoir”
John Price of Council Bluffs, IA for his essay “Dave and the Devil”
