In poetry, our winner is Margaret Wright, for her poem “Accidents.” Of the poem, poetry judge Paige Lewis says, “Is it possible for a poem to be a ghost? From the description of liminal spaces (the stopped train, the empty roller rink) to the uncertainty of the ‘accident,’ to the poem’s desire for us to…
In fiction, our winner is Meghan O’Toole, for her short story “Good Food for Starving Things.” Of the story, fiction judge Kiley Reid says, “‘Good Food for Starving Things’—dark, abrupt, and a bit wild—is a deft cross-pollination concerning what it means to be a beast, and what it means to belong. With addictive and highly…
As soon as Tiffany steps off the yellow school bus onto the strip of grass across from her house, her stomach gurgles and roils and she thinks she might throw up. She’s twelve years old and just home from the first day of sixth grade. She’s a pretty girl, though she doesn’t know it. She’s…
Indra says no, don’t, and Jeff says nothing. They’re in his car on a quiet mountain road. It’s summer and hot and the windows are open. In the surrounding woods cicadas are roaring. Jeff’s hand is on Indra’s knee. He’s in the driver’s seat, twisted around, leaning close to her. It’s the moment before a…
I wasn’t surprised when I heard the stories about him on the news. Because of what had happened. Because of his—antics, his demeanor, maybe you’d say. I knew him back then and it’s been a long time now. But still. He was an athlete, yes, but he had long, thin fingers, like a piano…
A good barbershop tells you who owns it, and that’s so with Blue Spark in Baltimore. Bill’s place is plastered with stickers advertising tattoo parlors and breweries and garage bands and the city itself: BALT superimposed over a rat. Skulls are popular, as are likenesses of Edgar Allan Poe. Bill calls Poe the city’s first…
The fall of 1991, as my boyfriend and I drove from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania to Virginia to West Virginia to Vermont and then all along the northern route through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California, the one consistent thing we witnessed from town to town and city to city…
My books, when I was a child, were populated with fairy godmothers, magic princes, wizards who would make your wishes come true with a wave of a wand or a few abracadabras. Inside these color-saturated pages, the characters took trips to far-off lands where spine-tingling adventures awaited. It was a fantasy beyond my own wildest…
“It was a dungeon,” Marvin Gilmore said about Boston State Hospital. “Like something out of medieval times.” Located on 232 acres of farmland, it began its therapeutic tenure in the late nineteenth century with promise, with the idea that a quiet pastoral setting outside the bustling city would do wonders for the lost and the…
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