Submission Guidelines | Contest Information | Previous Contest Winners
Previous Contest Winners
| Abby Geni, "Silence" Abby Geni has previously been published in Glimmer Train, the Indiana Review, and Confrontation Magazine. Her stories have received first place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, as well as Honorable Mentions in the Kate Braverman Short Story Prize and in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award. As a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Abby was the recipient of the Iowa Fellowship. She lives in Chicago, where she has begun work on a novel. |
| Susan Jo Russell/Poetry (2009) Susan Jo Russell was born in Chicago in November 1946. She has been working for a number of years with a collection of letters her father wrote her mother while he was in the army during World War II. When she began inventing her mother’s voice, her winning poem began to take shape. She is a mathematics educator whose writing for students and teachers has been published widely. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, Peregrine, Passager, Slant, The Comstock Review, and California Quarterly. She now lives in Somerville, MA with her two housemates and a varying number of cats. |
 |
Robin Becker Robin Becker has written seven collections of poetry, including: Domain of Perfect Affection (2006), Venetian Blue (2002), The Horse Fair (2000) and All-American Girl (1996). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times, Becker has been honored with a Prairie Schooner’s Strousse Award and a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship. She received the Lamden Literary Award, and her poems and book reviews have appeared in The American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. She serves as poetry editor for The Women’s Review of Books and writes a column on poetry and the poetry scene called “Field Notes.” She teaches English and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. |
 |
Jill Koenigsdorf / prose (2008) Jill Koenigsdorf won for “Browsers and Grazers.” Koenigsdorf divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she writes, sells antiques and walks dogs, and The Bay Area, where she owned and operated Spring Fever Flowers for twenty four years. Her work has appeared in: ZYZZYVA; Tin House; American Short Fiction; The Southwest Review; The South Dakota Review; The Sun; and the anthology: The Whole Story: Editors On Fiction. Her stories have placed in both the California Voices competition sponsored by Poets & Writers magazine, and in the “New Millennium” contest. She has also received The Peregrine Prize and The McGinnis Award for her short-stories. Her non-fiction appears regularly in The San Francisco Chronicle and The New Mexican newspapers. She has recently completed a novel which she hopes to find a home for in the coming year. |
 |
Jude Nutter / poetry (2008) Jude Nutter, of Edina, Minnesota, won for “Growing up in Bergen-Belsen: Sleeping with Ann Frank,” “Growing up in Bergen-Belsen: The Insect Collector,” “Espenbaum in Bergen-Belsen, May 2007,” and “Road Kill.” Nutter was born in North Yorkshire, England, and grew up in northern Germany in a building that was once part of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Her poems have appeared in numerous international journals and anthologies and she is the recipient of several awards and grants. Her first collection, Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), was published in 2002. The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame) won the Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry. A third collection, I Wish I Had A Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press. In 2004 she spent two months in Antarctica with the National Science Foundation’s Writers and Artists Program. She has been living and working in Minneapolis since 1998. |
 |
Catherine Alden / prose (2007) Catherine Alden of Oakland, California, wone for her short story "Sickness Can Do That to a Man." Alden trained as a visual artist, receiving an MFA from Alfred University in 1985. Her artwork has been featured in The New Yorker and, in 2004, one of her stories won Honorable Mention in Boulevard’s Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers. "Sickness Can Do That to a Man" is her first published piece. |
 |
Patricia Smith / poetry (2007) Patricia Smith of Tarrytown, New York, is the author of Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection (Coffee House Press, 2006); Close to Death and Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland Books) and Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha). Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Callaloo, TriQuarterly, and in many anthologies including The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. Smith is also a four-time champion of the National Poetry Slam, still the most successful slammer in the competition’s history. |
 |
Dan Carlson / prose (2006) Dan Carlson was born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and currently resides in Knoxville. He graduated in 1997 with a BA in English from the University of Vermont. Afterward, he lived three years apiece in Boston and San Francisco where, respectively, where he worked for the Ritz-Carlton and as a marketing copywriter for a small travel company. He has completed two novels, both unpublished to date. Smoke and Static is his first published work of fiction. |
 |
Douglas Goetsch / poetry (2006) Douglas Goetsch of New York City is the author of The Job of Being Everybody, which won the 2003 Cleveland State University Poetry Center open book competition, and Nobody's Hell (Hanging Loose Press, 1999). His honors include three chapbook prizes, the Paumanok Award, a Prairie Schooner Reader's Choice Award, and two poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. He runs the creative writing program for incarcerated teens at Passages Academy in the Bronx and is editor of Jane Street Press. |
 |
Mark DeFoe / poetry (2005) Mark DeFoe has published six chapbooks. Bringing Home Breakfast (Black Willow, 1983), Palmate (Pringle Tree Press, 1988), AIR (Green Tower Press, 1998), Aviary (Pringle Tree Press, 2001), The Green Chair (Pringle Tree Press, 2003) and Mark DeFoe’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2004). His poetry has appeared in such magazines as Poetry, The Yale Review, The Paris Review, New Letters, among many others. He lives in Buckhannon, West Virginia. |
 |
David Feinstein for "Enoch" / prose (2005) David Feinstein is a recent graduate of Oberlin College, where he received a B.A. in Creative Writing in 2004. “Enoch,” a work of nonfiction, is his first published piece. Originally from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he currently lives and writes in New York City. |
 |
Ellen Bass / poetry (2004) Ellen Bass’s most recent book is Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), which won the Lambda Literary Award. Among her other honors are the Elliston Book Award from the University of Cincinnati, the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman, the Larry Levis Prize from Missouri Review, and a fellowship from the California Arts Council. She is also coeditor with Florence Howe of No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973). She lives in Santa Cruz, California. |
 |
Gina Ochsner for "The Dog-Saint" / prose (2004) Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon, with her husband and four children. Other short works of hers have appeared in Chelsea, The New Yorker, Nimrod International, Flyway, and The Kenyon Review. Her first collection of stories, The Necessary Grace to Fall, won the Flannery O'Connor Award. In 2005 Houghton Mifflin published a new collection, People I Wanted to Be. |
