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Young Writers’ Prize Winners!
M.T. Anderson: judge
June 19th, 2010. We’re so pleased to announce the winners, runners-up, and finalists for the first-ever Hunger Mountain Young Writers’ Prize!
First place winner in fiction: Rachel Thomas from Springdale, Arizona for “Ninjaboy”
First place winner in poetry: Mishka Hoosen from Johannesburg, South Africa for “Some Last Things to Arrange”
First place winner in creative nonfiction: Delali Ayivor from Houston, Texas for “Fefe Naa Efe”
Runner-up in fiction: Mishka Hoosen from Johannesburg, South Africa for “Any Regrets? Tell Us What Happened”
Runner-up in poetry: Jaclyn Porfilio from West Roxbury, Massachusetts for “Reckoning”
Runner-up in creative nonfiction: Dan Zhao from Elmhurst, NY for “A Wintry Requiem”
Fiction finalists:
Karina McCorkle from Cary, North Carolina for “The Banality of Butterflies”
Bronwyn Anne Harper from Crystal Lake, Illinois for “Shadows of Stone”
Isabella Mascheroni from New York, New York for “Phone Call in the Mid-Atlantic”
Poetry Finalists:
Meg Lincoln from North Haven, Connecticut for “Pillar of Salt”
Nicola Goldberg from Portola Valley, California for “Elegy”
Hannah Miller from Tenafly, New Jersey for “Morning Miracle”
Creative nonfiction finalists:
Emma Broder from Hamden, Connecticut for “Vectors”
McKenzie Lee Will from Shoreline, Washington for “Laugh it Out”
Lena Shefelman from Irvington, New York for “Grandmother Will Be Fine”
The first place winner for each genre will receive $250 and publication here on Hunger Mountain online. Runners-up will receive $100. We received over 150 entries of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and we were honestly blown away by the talent we saw on those pages. Choosing the winners and runners-up was difficult! Here’s what our judge, National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson, best-selling author of Feed and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, says about the winners:
“In a contest with so many wonderful entries, a final decision about which piece is “best” is, to a great extent, nonsensical. Across the board, I was delighted with the tonal sophistication and the fluidity of the writing. In particular, it’s great that so many of these young authors are not afraid of style – that they are clearly conscious of the unique qualities of their own voices and aren’t shying away from their own eccentricities, but rather embracing them. This, to me, is what sets literary writing apart from everything else. The entries I finally chose – regretting all of those equally deserving authors who I could not choose – are each great examples of that confidant deployment of stylistic particularity.
“In the Poetry category, I have picked Mishka Hoosen’s poem “Some Last Things to Arrange,” a half-glimpsed narration of ominous events we only can barely perceive before the images scatter in a burst of gunshot and a flurry of startled birds. In the nonfiction category, Delali Ayivor’s memoir “Fefe Naa Efe” also relies on incredibly concrete details worked into a half-seen scenario – in this case, a childhood divided between Africa and the States. In both these cases, the authors allude to things we can’t quite see, but anchor their narratives in specifics (the hair of a brother; the grease in a cooking-pit; footsteps in Michigan snow).
“The fiction winner, Rachel Thomas’s “Ninjaboy” is much more straightforward in its narrative, but acquires its force through a beautifully-modulated distance from the character (referred to only as “Ninjaboy”). This narrator walks the line between irony and compassion. His/Her voice is stylistically distinctive, flatly insisting on repetitions of words and phrases which produce a dry, faintly mocking tone – but which also allow him/her to gradually draw a portrait of a boy for whom we feel tremendous sympathy.
“This kind of stylistic bravery was a feature, as I’ve said, of so many of these pieces: from a fragmented memoir about a dying grandmother, told almost entirely in brief, broken images, to a robustly feisty description of one girl’s struggle with a syndrome that makes her – and everyone else in her family – pee when they laugh too hard. From a story about a character studying vectors in physics, written, as it were, entirely in tangential vectors which gradually push the character around, to a bleak account of one boy’s attempt to recover from the death of a childhood friend, a piece steeped in memory and shifts in time. … I wish there were space to write about the clever devices used by each of these authors – but instead, I’ll just close by saying that writers as sure-footed as those I read in the course of judging this contest have a bright future before them. Good luck to all of you!”
–M. T. Anderson
Deadline for Howard Frank Mosher Prize is June 30th!
Steve Almond, author of Candy Freak, will judge.
Don’t miss your chance to enter the 2010 Howard Frank Mosher Prize for Short Fiction. The winner receives $1000 and publication, and two runners-up receive $100 each. Make sure to check out the guidelines and get your entry to us by June 30th (postmark deadline.) You can also read last year’s winner and runner-up right here on the website.
The Deadline for the Katherine Paterson Prize for YA and Children’s Writing is June 30th!
Holly Black
The deadline for the Katherine Paterson Prize is June 30th. We welcome YA and Middle Grade entries, as well as writing for young children. Please read last year’s winner and runners up and then check out our full contest guidelines. Holly Black, the author of The Spiderwick Chronicles will judge this year’s Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing. Holly Black is also the author of the Modern Faerie Tale series and other contemporary fantasy novels for young adults and the Good Neighbors graphic novels.
Winner: Ashley Seitz Kramer
Ashley Seitz Kramer wins 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize
2010 judge Matthew Dickman, author of All American Poem has selected Ashley Seitz Kramer of Lakewood, Ohio as the winner of the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize for her poem “Between Land and Water.” Ashley will receive $1000 and publication in Hunger Mountain. Runners-up are Nancy Pearson of Welfleet, Massachusetts for “Opening Day” and “Blackwater” and Samantha Kolber of Montpelier, Vermont for “Jewel Tones,” a Pantoum. Both runners-up receive $100 and publication. Click here for more information about winners and finalists.
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