This year, Leslie Marmon Silko chose Heather Brittain Bergstrom's "All Sorts of Hunger" for this year's Short Fiction Contest! We had over 250 submissions. Per our contest code of ethics, we turn submissions over to our editorial panelists to blind-read each manuscript and rank their top choices. After the panel narrows down the first cut with a second reading, the semifinalist stories are given to our judge to make the final decision.
Winner:
Heather Brittain Bergstrom's "All Sorts of Hunger"
Heather Brittain Bergstrom has won writing awards from Narrative Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic Monthly, as well as from other places. Her fiction has been published in Narrative, The Chicago Tribune, Tampa Review, Willow Springs, The Greensboro Review, and in the anthology Falling Backwards: Stories of Fathers and Daughters. “All Sorts of Hunger” is part of her recently finished story collection entitled Lake with the Dead Indian Chief’s Name. Set in eastern Washington, these linked tales capture the dusty Interior West and its often wandering characters who no longer seek furs or gold or large parcels of land, though their desires, in some ways, are just as unattainable: sleep, warmth, food, forgiveness, family, and clarity. Heather Brittain Bergstrom was born and raised in a small farming town in eastern Washington, but currently lives in northern California with her husband and two children. She holds a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing.
Finalists:
“Return” by Sharon May
 Sharon May researched the Khmer Rouge regime for Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights and edited In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia. Her stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, the Chicago Tribune, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Manoa, and other journals. She is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
“Mr Smith's Tip Top Tale of Woe” by Nancy Holyoke
 Nancy Holyoke has worked for The New Yorker, Wigwag, American Girl magazine, and the Rowland Reading Foundation. She's the author of a half-dozen children's books and the editor of far more. She has an MFA from the Iowa Workshop.
|
2010 Editorial Panel:
Leslie Marmon Silko {Judge}
 Leslie Marmon Silko is a former professor of English and fiction writing, is the author of novels, short stories, essays, poetry, articles, and filmscripts. She has won prizes, fellowships, and grants from such sources as the National Endowment for the Arts and The Boston Globe. She was the youngest writer to be included in The Norton Anthology of Women's Literature, for her short story "Lullaby." Ms. Silko lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Natalie Bazsile
Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel-in-progress, The Grinding Season, which won the Hurston/Wright College Writer's Award and was runner-up in the Faulkner Pirate's Alley novel-in-progress competition. She is a two-time Ragdale where she was awarded the Sylvia Clare Brown fellowship. Excerpts of The Grinding Season have appeared in ZYZZYVA and Cairn. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers where she was a Holden Minority scholar. She is a fiction editor at The Cortland Review and a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto.
Ru Freeman
Ru Freeman was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka she arrived in the United States with a Parker ink pen and a box of Staedler pencils to attend Bates College in Maine Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Story Quarterly,Crab Orchard Review, WriteCorner Press, Kaduwa and elsewhere and has been nominated for the Best New American Voices anthologies in 2006 and 2008. Her debut novel, A Disobedient Girl, which is published by Atria Books/Simon & Schuster in the USA and is available in Audio from Tantor Media.
Caitlin Horrocks
Caitlin Horrocks’ fiction appears in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2009, The Paris Review, Tin House and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, This Is Not Your City, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2011. She is winner of the 2010 Plimpton Prize, and of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. She teaches at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Sharon Wahl
Sharon Wahl lives in Tucson and helps to run Open Lens Productions, a video production company. She is currently finishing her first novel, Passionate Reason, a novel about love, obsession, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Her short stories, poems, and essays have been published in
The Iowa Review, the Chicago Tribune, StoryQuarterly, Pleiades, the Harvard Review, and other journals. |
|
