With all of the fantastic work submitted to us for this year’s contest, it was harder than usual to pick the prize winners! We got a lot of pieces the editors were excited about, and it took some spirited debate before we came to a consensus. Ultimately, we decided to have 2 top winners, one each in poetry and prose, along with 3 honorable mentions.
Without further ado, here are the results of this year’s contest:
2023 Prose Winner:
“Natural Instincts” by Abigail Rose
2023 Poetry Winner:
“My Pro-Life Father Spays a Dog” by Isibéal Owens
Honorable Mentions:
“The Ladybug Door” by Allison Burris
“Crossing the Corpus Callosum” by Marcia Hurlow
“Zoo” by Danielle Sherman
Short List/Contributors:
“rut” by Jacob Friesenhahn
“Kitchen Love No. 709” by Jane McBride
“Two Horses” by Lucia Owen
“The Sacred Chicken of Impatience” by Steve Petkus
“Landed” by Linda Petrucelli
“I Dream I Live with a Baby Elephant” by Carla Sarett
…congratulations to all of our winners and contributors! It was a very competitive contest this year and we’re excited to share all of these delightful words with our readers in the “Animals” Contest print issue, which will be released in May.
We have also officially sold out of our first print run of Contest Issue #2 (“Oops! All Genre”) so we’ll be doing a second print run of that issue in May, as well! Along with individual issue sales, we’ll have issue 1-3 bundles available on our website and at our table at the Greater Pittsburgh Festival of Books on May 11th.
And if you want to get your work in our next unthemed online issue, there’s plenty of time! Submissions are open through April 30th and you can find the deets or send your work on our Submittable page.
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