Fall Contests

The editors of Mid-American Review would like to congratulate the winners of the 2012-2013 literary competitions.

The Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award

We extend our congratulations to Woody Skinner, winner of this year’s Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award, for his story “Things in Slow Motion.” Alan Heathcock, this year’s judge and author of Volt, writes, that Skinner’s story, “was a bit of a miracle in that it told a story in a collective voice while making the story feel completely intimate, a story of class and privilege, of love and infidelity, of everything we see and think we see, about hope and fear, about rumor and truth. So much is made of how we’re separate as a people, and yet this story, revolving around a surgeon and his family, proves that all of us are alike if only in our separation. What a sad, true, and beautiful sentiment. The voice of the story says of the surgeon, ‘We are lifeless figures splayed in front of you... You see parts of us we've never seen.’ Like a surgeon, such is the work of this author, and ‘Things in Slow Motion’ allows us to glimpse ourselves, though in a way that's bearable, and, as is written in its last line, lends us, ‘...a lonesome kind of comfort.’ Beautifully written, deeply moving: BRAVO!”
 
Mr. Skinner will be awarded the $1,000 prize and his story will be published in issue 33.2 of Mid-American Review, due this spring.

We are happy to announce four additional stories and authors, also submitted as finalists:

“The Exhibit” by B. Boyer-White
“On Brian’s Dreams of Submarines” by Robert Long Foreman
“How Will It Smash” by Becky Kaiser
“Severance” by Bailey Lewis

The James Wright Poetry Award

We extend our congratulations to Mark Wagenaar, winner of this year’s James Wright Poetry Award, for his poem “The Body Distances (Still Life with Everything in the World).” Traci Brimhall, this year’s judge and author of Our Lady of the Ruins, writes that the winning poem, “tackles the miraculous, the relationship of one body to another, the vagaries of faith, and language’s ability to communicate the revelation of the moon on water. I admire its imagistic leaps, its shifting rhetoric, and its subtle music—how ‘borne’ slides into ‘bone,’ ‘scribes’ swings into ‘times.’ Its absences and unbridgeable distances stayed with me—the body, the moon, a heart’s extra vessel, an anomalous groove in the brain. It made me think, it made me feel, it made me want the miraculous all to myself. I love its mixture of beauty and agony, tenderness and awe, its crowning yes.”

Mr. Wagenaar will be awarded the $1,000 prize and his poem will be published in issue 33.2 of Mid-American Review, due this spring.

We are happy to announce five additional poems and their authors, also submitted to the judge as finalists:

“One Story” by Sara Gelston
“Patriotics” and “Family History (I)” by Jennifer Luebbers
“Tennessee State Prison, 1977" by Marie Thurmer
“In the Second Half of Life” by Leslie Williams

All queries regarding the contests can be directed to the MAR Staff.

Information regarding the 2013-2014 competitions can be found here.

For full results and information on our 2011-2012 competitions, click here.