In nonfiction, our winner is Jung Hae Chae for her story “Pojangmacha People.” Of her essay, nonfiction judge Leslie Jamison said, “A searing lyric built of sweat and salt and sorrow, hot soup and deep shame—an ode to the elderly drunk men seeking solace in the “tiny domed cathedral” of every drinking hut along the…
In nonfiction, our winner is Laura Price Steele for her essay “These Bodies Will Undo Us.” Nonfiction judge Roxane Gay said the following about the winning piece: “‘These Bodies Will Undo Us’…is one of the finest essays I have ever read. It’s an essay about a marriage, about love when your partner transitions and so…
In dreams, she sees her mother arrive in a land where the boreal canopy eclipses homeland. Her first memory of an elk in Jasper, Alberta: its legs seizing with strength, it gallops toward homeland. As she reads the Quran, she becomes a rose-ringed parakeet ascending over bismillah to find homeland. She is…
From you, I was born, my body an isosceles triangle made with two equal sides of longing: what is given and what is prayed for, these pining lengths yoked together by the latitude of a risen country I have never visited. I imagine the view from the ocean is your body, and your body is…
Every prayer is a heron at first glance, the marbled neck of someone indistinguishable from this house. Every figure wildreed unbelonged cursive is a morning’s mound of sugar. This mosque is a wood where I sit cross-legged, alder straight. Where I mirror my mother’s twenty-year-ago askings. …
Where this body is a map and blood, great-blood, great-great-blood is the destination, where the tragedy is not knowing a name until it is a burial, and even then, only after it is hallowed from its journey, crossing a sea, wrung on the muscles of grief. At your grave, it must be…
In fiction, our winner is Anne de Marcken for her story “Foil.” Of her story, fiction judge Carmen Maria Machado said, “I couldn’t get enough of this story, its beauty and strangeness, the way it turned in on itself over and over again. So many moments and sentences quickened something inside me—gorgeous. I loved how…
In nonfiction, our winner is Ellen Adams for her essay “The Something I Am Telling You.” Nonfiction judge Meghan Daum said of the piece: “In telling the story of a brain losing its moorings, the author pulled off an astonishing trick and made me feel like the brain itself was talking to me. There is…
In fiction, our winner is Rowan Beaird for her story “Perennial.” Of her story, fiction judge Garth Greenwell said, “The subject of this delicate, psychologically penetrating story is the derangement of grief, which it dramatizes with deftness and patience. It demands a similar patience from the reader; its quiet discloses startling depths. Best of all…
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