When my grandmother pulled out the wool suit I hated and told me to take a bath, I wondered just how long it would take before she told me that my father was the thing under the blue tarp in the wagon the men brought up from the fields, but I watched her go to…
In fiction, our winner is Lucy Tan for her story “Safety of Numbers.” This year’s fiction judge, Megan Mayhew Bergman, writes: “‘Safety of Numbers’ stood out to me as a confident and ultimately believable piece of short fiction, one with solid, gimmick-free writing that took up space beyond its page count. There was a real…
Because the cemetery was having a BOGO sale (“buy one, get one”) and real estate dear, my mother bought my burial plot the year I turned eleven and broke my leg and you appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the platonic ideal of a pink-and-yellow swimsuit, a form made merely of paint, a…
When my white friends turn to me, upset at my indifference to their conversation about Michael Brown, I point at the lone cue ball I’d been rolling around the table. I spin it and say this is one revolution I can control. It’s how I compress the conversation into metaphor. It’s the only way I…
I am an anagram of my father. In America, it is anapound. It is an archaic system of measurement. I have my father’s eyes. I am made of letters I didn’t learn until I was five. A is for assimilation, which is an anagram for cultural exorcism. If I say I’m glad I can speak…
In nonfiction, our winner is Emily Strasser for her essay “Homeplace.” The nonfiction judge, Jabari Asim, writes: “In ‘Homeplace,’ Emily Strasser investigates family history and the remnants of a community transformed by our government’s covert development of nuclear weaponry. With careful scrutiny she sifts through long-simmering secrets, exposing the large and small costs of a…
My mother helped me write the first poem because I knew it wasn’t safe in there. Weary people, she began—the cigarette smoke drawing sadness in the air (as if I should do something with all the people). Walk the streets fell into the next line because it was all I could make happen. That…
A horseman was found horseless on the side of the road. We asked after his horse, but he had no recollection, of a horse or of his having been a horseman. And so how were we so sure? How did we know this was a man who lacked the very thing that defined him? We…
After her husband died she sent herself to other worlds Belfast and Paris and some other ununited states—to be in places—as she put it—that felt as strange as the strangeness of the other earth under the one we dream we are standing on. She took pictures of the beyond and sent them over. She wrote…
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