Prairie Schooner News

Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is pleased to announce that our 2016 Book Prize Winners’ books are now available from the University of Nebraska Press and wherever books are sold.

Black Jesus and Other Superheroes by Venita Blackburn won the 2016 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, receiving $3000 and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Blackburn has made “an indelible impression with her first collection of short stories” according to Foreword’s starred review, and Aimee Bender called the book “electrically alive, funny, real.” Black Jesus and Other Superheroes was selected by guest-judges Jennine Capó Crucet and Helon Habila with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. Venita Blackburn is an English instructor at Arizona State University, and her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including American Short Fiction, Faultline, the Georgia Review, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She was awarded a Bread Loaf fellowship and a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2014. Blackburn is from Compton, California and earned her MFA from Arizona State University. She now lives and teaches in Phoenix.

The Zoo at Night by Susan Gubernat won the 2016 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, receiving $3000 and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Called a “grand tour of the many ways that the world, arriving directly under our noses, can remain, everlastingly, embodied and mysterious” by Mark Svenvold, the collection has been described as full of “poems of meticulous craftsmanship, luminous apprehension, and unfailing heart” by Linder Gregerson. The Zoo at Night was selected by Valzhyna Mort and Hilda Raz with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. Susan Gubernat She is the author of Flesh, winner of the Marianne Moore Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Analog House. An opera librettist, her major work, Korczak’s Orphans, in collaboration with composer Adam Silverman, has been performed in a number of venues. She is a professor of English at California State University, East Bay, and lives in Oakland, California.

We hope both Blackburn and Gubernat will visit the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s campus this coming spring for Prairie Schooner’s Annual Book Prize Reading and Celebration. Be sure to check out their work prior to their visit, and get your books ready to be signed! Both The Zoo at Night and Black Jesus and Other Superheroes are available to purchase from the University of Nebraska Press.

The competition, now in its fifteenth year, runs January 15 to March 15 annually. Submission details and a list of past winners are available online.

Thanks to generous supporters of the literary arts, Prairie Schooner was able to award eighteen writing prizes totaling $8,500 for work published by established and emerging writers in 2016.

Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade of Hollywood, Florida, received the $1,500 Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award for their collaborative essay “13 Superstitions” published in the Fall 2016 issue. The Glenna Luschei Award is made possible by the generosity of poet, publisher, and philanthropist Glenna Luschei.

The $1,000 Lawrence Foundation Award for the best short story published in Prairie Schooner in 2016 was given to David Crouse, of Seattle, WA, for his story “I’m Here” from the Spring 2016 issue. This prize is made possible by the Lawrence Foundation of New York City and its director, Leonard S. Bernstein.

The $1,000 Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing was given to Alireza Taheri Araghi, of St. Louis, MO, for his story “Snow” from the Fall 2016 issue. The Faulkner Award is supported by charitable contributions to honor Virginia Faulkner, former editor-in-chief of the University of Nebraska Press and Prairie Schooner fiction editor.

The $1,000 Edward Stanley Award for poetry was given to Genevieve Williams, of Omaha, NE, for four poems in the Fall 2016 issue. This award is made possible through charitable contributions from the family of Edward Stanley, a member of the committee that founded Prairie Schooner in 1926.

The $500 Bernice Slote Award for the best work by a beginning writer was given to Kaitlyn Teer, of Bellingham, WA, for her essay “Drawing A Breath” from the Summer 2016 issue. The Slote Award is supported by the estate of Bernice Slote, Prairie Schooner editor from 1963 through 1980.

The $500 Annual Prairie Schooner Strousse Award for the best poem or group of poems was given to David Campos of Clovis, CA, for three poems in the special food-themed portfolio of the Winter 2016 issue. The Strousse Award is given in honor of Flora Strousse.

The $250 Hugh J. Luke Award was given to Rigoberto Gonzalez for his essay “Adelina” in the Spring 2016 issue. The Hugh J. Luke Award was established in memory of Prairie Schooner’s editor from 1980 through 1987.

The $250 Jane Geske Award was given to Rachel Heng of London, UK, for her story “The Vegetarian” from the Summer 2016 issue. The award is given by Norman Geske in honor of his wife, Jane Geske, a lifelong support of Nebraska’s literary arts.

Ten writers received annual Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards for $250 each. These awards are made possible through the generosity of Glenna Luschei.

Matthew Shenoda, of Evanston, IL, for his essay “Damming the Nile” in the Summer issue

Brynne Rebele-Henry, of Richmond, VA, for her story “The Small Elf People” in the Summer issue

Kirun Kapur, of Amesbury, MA, for her poem “Parvati at Her Bath” in the Summer issue

Afaa Michael Weaver, of West Conway, CT, for his poem, “East Baltimore, Fried Chicken,” in the Winter issue

Christopher Salerno, of Caldwell, NJ, for his poem “Sorrow, Architecture,” in the Fall issue

Philip Huynh, of Richmond, British Columbia for the story “The Abalone Diver” in the Winter issue

Laura Kolbe, of Boston, MA, for her poem, “Garter, Copper, Water” in the Winter issue

Paul Martin, of Allentown, PA, for his poem “The Radish,” in the Spring issue

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of Oxford, MS, for the essay “How to Make Halo-Halo Last” in the Winter issue

Kerry Cullen, of Queens, NY, for her story “Parts” in the Spring issue

Prairie Schooner is published with support from the University of Nebraska Press, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department and its creative writing program, and the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editorship and Fund for Excellence at Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska Foundation. Subscriptions may be ordered by visiting http://prairieschooner.unl.edu. You can also follow Prairie Schooner on Twitter and Facebook.

Prairie Schooner is pleased to name E. M. Tran the winner of the 2016 Summer Nonfiction Contest, judged by Kiese Laymon, for her essay “Miss Saigon.” Tran will receive a prize of $250, and her essay will appear in the Spring 2017 edition of Prairie Schooner. E. M. Tran is a Vietnamese American fiction writer from New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her MFA from the University of Mississippi, and she is currently pursuing her PhD in Fiction at Ohio University. Her work is also forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review. Visit www.elizabethmtran.com.

Kiese Laymon, the judge of this year's prize, is a black southern writer best known for his essays and fiction. The author of two books, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and the Others in America and the novel Long Division, Laymon is currently an Associate Professor of English at Vassar College. Laymon has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications including Esquire, ESPN the Magazine, Colorlines, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, PEN Journal, the Oxford American, and Guernica. He is a currently a columnist at the Guardian, and two more books—a memoir, Heavy, and a second novel, And So On—are forthcoming from Scribner.

Laymon said of Tran's essay: “In way more ways than I'd like to admit, stories of survivorship necessitate multiple threads because no one earth is a survivor of just one trauma, villain or love. The essay, ‘Miss Saigon’ renders survivorship in its multifaceted, multigenerational, geographically varied wonder. In a contest filled some of the best essays I've read in the 21st century, no essay made as much use of the literal and emotional space as ‘Miss Saigon.’ It reminded me that stories of immigration are necessary stories lost and found, or performative longing and necessary shedding. It is absolutely amazing art.”

(photo credit John Levy)

Boyer Rickel's essay “Morgan: A Lyric” is this year's runner-up. Laymon called Rickel's essay "easily the most structurally creative of all the essays I read. The piece, in many ways, necessitates an innovative structure because of what it's doing with the body's shell, the body's insides, the body's invariable breaking. The piece is the literal story of life, love, misdirection and death. I felt it, heard what I shouldn't have heard, and will remember how the piece looked as it quaked for the rest of my writing life." Boyer Rickel's publications include two poetry collections, remanence (Parlor) and arreboles (Wesleyan), a memoir-in-essays, Taboo (Wisconsin), and a poetry chapbook, reliquary (Seven Kitchens). Recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arizona Commission on the Arts, he taught in the University of Arizona creative writing program for twenty years. “Morgan: A Lyric” is the final section of a four-part sequence by the same title. The first part won the Tupelo Quarterly 2014 prose award; the second appeared in Guernica.

Editor Kwame Dawes said of the contest, now in its fifth year, “Each year, I become increasingly appreciative of Sara Fawn Montgomery, our Assistant Nonfiction Editor who initiated this exciting contest which has brought us such startling riches as the two writers we are celebrating here, and of course, our judge Kiese Laymon.  Tran’s piece is engrossing and wholly engaging while being elegantly constructed and powerfully enlightening. And it is impossible to walk away from the rollicking formal play with time and idea in Rickel’s work without concluding, well, how else but this way can such a story be told?  Our journal, and, by extension, our readers are wholly enriched by these wonderful new stories.”

Last year’s winner was Laura Elizabeth Woollet, whose essay “Working Girl” appeared in the Spring 2016 edition of Prairie Schooner. The previous year’s winner, Aurvi Sharma’s essay “Eleven Stories of Water and Stone” was recently listed as “notable” in Best American Essays 2016, and the previous year’s winner, Melissa Febos’s essay “Call My Name,” was also listed as a Best American notable in 2015. To read Assistant Nonfiction Editor Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s interview with judge Kiese Laymon, visit http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/blog/evil-and-joy-and-other-mushy-part-between-interview-kiese-laymon. To learn more about Prairie Schooner, the latest issues, and how to subscribe, visit http://prairieschooner.unl.edu.

by Danielle Pringle

Best American Essays 2016 (Mariner), edited by Jonathan Franzen, launched this week, including in its list of “notable” essays four pieces that appeared in Prairie Schooner. The annual anthology celebrates the best essays from the past year published by magazines, journals, and websites in the United States. Included with the essays selected for this collection, is a supplemental list of “notable” essays.

Lisa Fay Coutley’s “Why to Run Racks” appeared in our Winter 2015 issue, which was edited by Natalie Diaz.  The beautifully crafted essay peeks into volatile family dynamics and considers the sport of shooting pool as a meditative practice. Read it on Coutley’s website here.

Porochista Khakpour’s whip-smart study of David Foster Wallace, Federer, and personal descent—whether physically losing an edge or being lost in one’s own mind—“Federer as Irreligious Experience,” highlights the downfalls of perfectionism. Her essay also appeared in our Winter 2015 issue. Read an excerpt of it on our website here.

Aurvi Sharma’s transporting “Eleven Stories of Water and Stone” won our 2014 nonfiction prize, judged by Judith Ortiz Cofer, and was published in our Spring 2015 issue. It also received our of our annual Glenna Luschei awards, which honor the best work published in Prairie Schooner in a given year. The essay takes the reader on a journey to the formation of the rock Sharma’s home in India rested upon, and through her childhood, seamlessly shifting from one to the other and examining greater implications of stone and water in India. Read an excerpt on our website here.

Emily Geminder’s “Coming To: A Lexicology of Fainting,” published in our Summer 2015 issue, was the 2014 nonfiction runner-up and also won a Glenna Luschei award. This braided lyric essay interrogates both personal and historical cultural perceptions of the haunting phenomenon of fainting. From Cambodia, to India, to the United States, Geminder offers glimpses of ghosts and specters. Read an excerpt of her essay here.

Once again, congratulations to all of the writers whose work was chosen to be in this year’s Best American Essays, and an extra shout out to those four “notables” whose essays appeared in our pages!

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Danielle Pringle was born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska, and is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing with a secondary focus in Medieval & Renaissance studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.