2013 Prairie Schooner Award Winners

Thanks to generous supporters of the literary arts, we’re proud and honored to award writing prizes totaling $8,500 to eighteen authors for their Prairie Schooner work published in 2013:

Lee Martin of Columbus, Ohio won the $1,500 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for his story, “Wrong Number” in the Summer issue. Martin has published three memoirs, most recently Such a Life. He is also the author of four novels, including Break the Skin and The Bright Forever, the latter a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University.

Lauren Acampora of Katonoah, New York won the $1,000 Lawrence Foundation Award for the story “Felt Life” in the Spring issue. Acampora’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, and The Antioch Review, among other publications. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and daughter.

Ellen O’Connell of Santa Barbara, California won the $1,000 Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing for her essay “Only X-Rays are Black & White” in the Fall issue. O’Connell is a California native whose work has been included in several literary journals and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. She is a contributing writer to the collection The Movement (Harper Perennial), and just completed her first novel.

Kevin Simmonds of San Francisco, California won the $1,000 Edward Stanley Award for his poem “Scott, Supervisor of the Dispossessed” in the Winter issue. Simmonds is a writer and musician living in San Francisco who composed and co-wrote Emmett Till, a river, a Japanese noh-inspired play that premiered at Theater of Yugen. His writing has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Octopus, softblow, and Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology.

Sarah Valentine of Los Angeles, California won the $500 Bernice Slote Award for the best work by a beginning writer for her essay “The Divine Auditor” in the Summer issue. Valentine is a poet, writer, and translator whose work has appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Zoland, and Poetics: An Empirical Journal of Culture. She received a Lannan Writers Residency in Marfa, Texas, and is the author of a book of Russian poetry translations, Into the Snow: Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi (Wave Books).

Heather Sellers of Holland, Michigan won the $500 Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award for her three poems in the Fall issue. Sellers teaches poetry and nonfiction at the University of South Florida. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses and The Boys I Borrow; and a memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead).

Traci Brimhall of Kalamazoo, Michigan won the $250 Jane Geske Award for her two poems in the Fall issue. Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), winner of the Barnard Women Poet’s Prize; and Rookery (SIU Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, King-Chávez-Parks Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts.

Nikki Giovanni of Christianburg, Virginia won the $250 Hugh J. Luke Award for her two poems in the Fall issue. Giovanni is a poet, activist, mother, and professor. She is a three-time NAACP Image Award winner, the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, and she holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry. The author of twenty-eight books, she is the University Distinguished Professor/English at Virginia Tech and an Oprah Living Legend.

There were ten winners of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards of $250 each:

• Moniza Alvi of Norfolk, England, for two poems in the Winter issue
• Vievee Francis of Hamtramck, Michigan, for two poems in the Summer issue
• Julianne Lynch of Denver, Colorado, for the story, “Broomhead” in the Summer issue
• Bryan Castille of St. Louis, Missouri, for the story “Ulan Bator” in the Summer issue
• Joy Moore of Jackson, Tennessee, for the poem “Tennessee Wedding” in the Fall issue
• Ishion Hutchinson of Ithaca, New York, for four poems in the Summer issue
• Mihaela Moscaliuc of Ocean, New Jersey, for the essay “Apples” in the Winter issue
• Natalie Scenters-Zapico of El Paso, Texas, for two poems in the Fall issue
• Karen An-hwei Lee of Santa Ana, California, for three poems in the Fall issue
• Craig Beaven of Houston, Texas, for the poem “Braids” in the Summer issue

Congratulations to all of our winners!