2019 Spring Contest Winners Announced

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This Spring, we announced our fiction and poetry contests for our forthcoming Issue 76, themed DOUBT. We received a very competitive number of submissions, and are pleased to announce that our judges have selected winners from a very strong list of contenders.

Fiction Contest, judged by R.O. Kwon

Winner: Julie Kim, with “The Egg”

“The Egg” begins with a woman about to make pancakes with her children, interrupted by an everyday, bloody, surprise. The story then opens out into something stranger, larger—to what, exactly? Is it a horror or a miracle? Is it imagined? It’s not necessarily clear, but the story’s real miracle is in its details, which feel truthful, unexpected, and entirely alive.

R.O. Kwon

Julie Cadman-Kim studied literature at Bennington College and is currently working on a collection of short stories that focuses on the macabre, magical, and mundane moments of modern life. She lives in Seattle with her family where she is a middle school teacher. You can find her on Twitter @julieloukim

Poetry Contest, judged by Raquel Salas Rivera

Winner: Connor Yeck with “Nocturne with Los Alamos Drive-Thru”

“Nocturne with Los Alamos Drive-Thru” pierced me. It is a play of lights in the Sonic drive-thru. Play of tint and tincture, surface and extract. Sonic as sun, as sound, phosphenes of memory. Time lapses that eclipse into the bone. There where two bodies becomes celestial in their relationality, mediated by a place, this poem moves, makes instant multiple. It bursts onto and out of surrounding systems. It remakes car into observatory, sunroof into moonroof. It maps as it feels. It holds me in a spectral knowability, pushing against each read and bringing me back into its questions.

Raquel Salas Rivera

Connor Yeck‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Carolina Quarterly, Smartish Pace, phoebe, JuxtaProse, Columbia, and Crab Orchard Review, for which he received the Allison Joseph Poetry Prize. He holds an MFA from Western Michigan University, where he also edited for Third Coast and New Issues Poetry and Prose. At the moment, he’s a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati.

Honorable Mentions:

  • Felicia Zamora (“Devil’s Tongue”)
  • Cameron McGill (“44.6336° N, 86.2345° W”)

Congratulations to all, and thanks to our judges, editors, readers and to everyone who submitted for participating!