Victoria Kornick Wins Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest

Victoria Kornick has been named the winner of the 2026 Summer Nonfiction Essay Contest for her essay “The House by the Sea.” Elissa Minor’s essay “With Dracula On the Ferris Wheel” was chosen as an honorable mention.

Kornick will receive a prize of $1000, and her essay will appear in the Spring 2027 edition of the journal.

Victoria Kornick is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in 32 Poems, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and The Best American Poetry series. Her collection Relief (Sarabande, 2027) was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Community of Writers, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Kornick holds an MFA in poetry writing from New York University, where she was a Rona Jaffe fellow, and a PhD in creative nonfiction from the University of Southern California. She teaches creative writing at Emory University. 

The contest was judged by Orenda Fink, author of The Witch’s Daughter. Fink is a musician, songwriter, performer, writer, and certified Jungian depth coach specializing in shadow work, dream interpretation, and narcissistic abuse recovery. Her work has been profiled in NPR, Vanity Fair, and more. She has been writing, recording, and touring since 1997, most notably with the bands Azure Ray, O+S, and the Casket Girls. Her first book, The Witch’s Daughter, is a memoir detailing life as the child of a mother with an undiagnosed personality disorder. It was a finalist for the 2025 Southern Book Prize. Born and raised in the South, Fink now resides in California’s Mojave Desert with her husband, Todd Fink of The Faint, and their dog, Grimm.

Of Kornick’s essay, Fink said, “A meditation on life and death as richly layered and challenging as our unconscious itself, ‘The House by the Sea’ immerses the reader in an unsettling dream, one that reveals not death, but our relationship to it. The essay follows one woman’s fight to give life and stay alive while another chooses to kill herself slowly. Three cats appear, one symbolic, one real, and one somewhere in between: ‘…an animal made from the skin of another animal.’ Together, they invite us to examine the many layers of meaning and reality in this lucid fever dream exploring how we choose to live and how we choose to die.”