Contest News

CNF Prize Winners!

Congratulations to Dani Bojanski, the winner of the 2012 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize, for “South Omaha From The F Street Exit, JFK Freeway.”  Sue William Silverman judged.

This year’s runners-up are Daisy Hernandez for “Blackout” and David LeGault for “I Got So Much Love I Don’t Know Where to Put It.” Congratulations, Daisy and David.

The finalists are:

• Aimee Baker, “A Family Medical History in Five Parts”
• Amy Boesky, “What We Talk about When We Talk about Risk”
• Amy Butcher, “The Places I Come From”
• Michael Gracey, “Treasure”
• Daisy Hernandez, “Stories She Tells Us”
• Julie Jeanell Leung, “Inscription”
• Daisy Pitkin, “An Algorithm”
• Diana Spechler, “The Matchmaker’s Mouth”
• Meredith Stricker, “The Theater of Memory”

Look for the winning pieces at www.hungermtn.org in January 2012.  Our sincere thanks to everyone who took part in this year’s Creative Nonfiction Prize. Your support means so much to Hunger Mountain and to independent publishing.

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Congratulations to the Winners of the 2011 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize

I’m excited to announce that the winner of the 2011 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, selected by Gish Jen, is Elizabeth Gonzales from Lancaster, Pennsylvania for “The Speed of Sound.” The winning piece will be published in the Hunger Mountain Menagerie, due out this fall. Here’s what Gish Jen has to say about Elizabeth’s story:

“The details!—from the insider’s view of the F-89 to the base at Thule to the smell of Fels nap soap to way the daytime sky looked from the observatory—”daffy, even”—this story wowed me. But even better were the emotions—the father wondering about his son’s cryptic statement; wondering if he’d inspired his son to follow him skyward; and wondering, now, if he was coming back. The author broke my heart with the end—so beautifully elliptically handled.”

Congratulations to runner up, Donald Quist from Hartsville, South Carolina for “The Ghosts of Takahiro Okyo,” a story Gish Jen calls “convincing, gripping, atmospheric, and shattering—a truly creepy, original, ambitious story that moves with great agility and touches on something profound.”

And congratulations to runner up Greta Schuler from St. Louis, Missouri for “Watch,” which Gish Jen calls “wonderfully terrible in its ironies: in the relationship between the protagonist and employer—in her reading of him, in his misreading of her; and who’s the “tricky one” here? I loved, too, how fraught every line was—as if the author could no more afford waste than the protagonist. A strong, dramatic story, it really brought Zimbabwe alive.”

The finalists for this year’s Howard Frank Mosher Prize are:

• Stephanie Dickinson from New York City for “JadeDragon_77″
• Sarah Elizabeth Schantz from Boulder, Colorado for “Electric Shock Therapy”
• Duy Nguyen from Quincy, Massachusetts for “Where Will You Be When You Are Reading This”
• Paulette Livers from Chicago, Illinois for “Soldier’s Joy”
• Ashleigh Eisinger from Houston, Texas for “Weight”
• Carmel Mawle from Fort Collins, Colorado for “Jamila”
• Susan Sharpe from Hume, Virginia for “Obit Guy”

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We’re thrilled to announce the winners of the 2011 Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adults and Children’s Writing, selected by Kimberly Wills Holt!

Congratulations to our first place winner, Heather Smith Meloche from Rochester Hills, Michigan for her YA story “Him.” Look for the winning piece in Hunger Mountain’s print issue due out this fall: the Hunger Mountain Menagerie. Kimberly Willis Holt has this to say about the winning piece:

“My only disappointment with that entry was I couldn’t read beyond what was submitted. From the start, Him, took me to a different world. The writer is one of those rare talents who can create a realistic setting and characters with few words. Aside from those attributes, I felt an instant compassion for the flawed main character, despite her bad choices. That is no easy task. Bravo!”

Congratulations also to our category winners: Sarah Tregay for her YA story “I Love You, Man”; Christy Lenzi for her Middle Grade novel excerpt “Forty Thieves and a Green-Eyed Girl”; and Betty Yee for her  story for younger children “Cesar.”

Kimberly Willis Holt also named two Special Mentions in this year’s prize: Betty Yee for her Young Adult novel excerpt “Gold Mountain Sojourn”; and Anna Craig for her Middle Grade novel excerpt “North of Hell’s Canyon.”

The very talented finalists for this year’s Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adults and Children’s Writing are:
• Caroline Misner for “The Popinjays Die Lightly” (Young Adult Short Story)
• Anna Dowdall for “The Haro Branch: Toola City” (Young Adult Novel Excerpt)
• Jennifer Kam for both “The Tall Grass” and “The White House” (Middle Grade Short Stories)
• Sandra Nickel for “The Saving of Saint Martha’s” (Middle Grade Novel Excerpt)
• Kristen Lenz for “The Power of Butterflies” (Writing for Younger Children/ Picture Book)
• Robin Heald for “Whistling for Angela” (Writing for Younger Children/ Picture Book)
• Emma Jane Silver for “Snow Trouble” (Writing for Younger Children/ Picture Book)
• Anne Bowen for “Lawn Mower Guy” (Writing for Younger Children/ Picture Book)

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2011 CNF Prize Judge is Sue William Silverman

We’re so pleased to announce the Sue William Silverman will be judging this year’s CNF prize at Hunger Mountain. Sue William Silverman is the author of Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, and Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir.

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Congratulations to the winners of the 2011 Hunger Mountain Prize for Young Writers

The first place winners’ work will be published here at Hunger Mountain Online soon. Listed below are the winners, runners-up, finalists, and one special mention selected by New York Times bestselling author Cynthia Leitich Smith.

Lin King is the first place winner in fiction for her short story “Rumor Has it in Winthrop.” Cynthia Leitich Smith offers this praise for the story: “Alternating first person point of view works well for the setting and subject matter.  The characters are well built with intriguing back-stories, machinations, and parallel constructs. The ending surprises the reader. It’s well rounded overall with some effective dark humor.”

Delali Ayivorwins first place in poetry for both “Threshold” and “The Office.” “The Office” is “an intriguing concept—stories/media commingling. Use of imagery is evocative. The last about dreaming in poetry is simply lovely.” “Threshold” “pulls in the reader with its strong sensory detail and setting. It offers emotional resonance, a reversal. The juxtaposition of pride/identity versus mainstream images of beauty/selling out leave us with much to think about.”

Sophie Haigney takes first place in creative nonfiction for her essay “What You Can Tell From My Childhood Heroes: Feminism and Other Things.” Cynthia Leitich Smith calls this an “excellent essay on gender empowerment, conflicting expectations and the natural adolescent preoccupation with fitting in. The diary to heroes would be an intriguing device to develop into a novel or larger collection of essays. ”

The Runner-up in fiction is Alexandria Juliet Lenzi for her short story “The Lost and Found Tale of Tod’s Invisible Jacket.” The Runner-up in poetry is Cara Dorris for “Spring Cleaning.” The Runner-up in creative nonfiction is Danny Rothschild for “Unrooted.” And a special Mention in poetry goes to Annalee Kwochka for her poem “Period.”

Prize for Young Writers Finalists:

• Delali Ayivor “The Depths” (fiction)
• Alyssa Clark “Silent Revolution” (fiction)
• Naomi Day “The Prettiest Face” (fiction)
• Edyt Dickstein for a sestina “The Color Blind” and a villanelle “National outcry” (poetry)
• Cara Dorris “And my arm went up and waved back” and “how camels land” (poetry)
• Sarah Dukes “Defining Rose” (fiction)
• Emily Hittner-Cunningham “After Looking-Glass” (fiction)
• Karina McCorkle “Seven Minutes in Junior High” (poetry)
• Colette Parry “Morning Fog” (poetry)
• Jackson Rollings “Tinnitus” and “Alaine Imitates Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator” (poetry)
• Trevin Smith “zero” (fiction)
• Olivia Valdes “Exhortations to a Young Abstraction” and “Otherwisers” and “Joy from West Africa” (poetry)

Congratulations to all the young writers who we honor with this prize. What a talented, creative, and hard working group!

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The Hunger Mountain Ruth Stone Poetry Prize Winners Announced!

The winner of Hunger Mountain’s 2011 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize is Rochelle Hurt from Wilmington, North Carolina, for “Third Surgery.” Here’s what Pulitzer prize winning poet Claudia Emerson, this year’s judge, has to say about the winning poem:

The voice in “Third Surgery” manages to be firmly insistent and heartbreakingly vulnerable. The poet sets the body’s trauma and its resilience against the workings of the natural world, the familiar and the unknowable—a beautifully balanced achievement.

Runner-up is Emily Pulfer-Terino from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for “Firstborn,” about which CLaudia Emerson writes:

“Firstborn” expresses with lyric intensity a particular anxiety, reforming the experience of the only child’s displacement to “firstborn” and sibling—and in the process delightfully pairing the architecture of the “world” and its rooms with that of the mother.

And another runner-up is April Goldman from Houston, Texas, for “Girls On Lake Pewaukee Consider The Future.” Claudia Emerson writes:

The collective voice of the “girls” masterfully rendered, the reader lingers as well on the threshold between the body’s awareness—reluctant, still submerged—and that of the intellect, fiercely forming.

Special mentions include Emily Pulfer-Terino from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, for “The Best Ideas,” and Austen Rosenfeld from New York, New York for “Snow.” The finalists for this year’s Hunger Mountain Ruth Stone Poetry Prize are:

• Rochelle Hurt from Wilmington, North Carolina for “Elsewhere”
• Caroline Carlson from Baltimore, Maryland for “Field Guide to Northern Trees”
• Holly Virginia Clark from San Francisco, California for “West 3^rd Street” and “Museum of Natural History”
• Sara Michas-Martin from San Francisco, California for “Overlay” and “Missing the Illusion of One”
• Angelo Nikolopoulos from New York, New York for “Letter” and “Her Summer Dress”
• April Goldman from Houston, Texas for “That She Not Be Mistaken For The Wind, God Made Eve Twice”

Congratulations to Rochelle, Emily, April, Austen and all of our finalists! Look for the winning poem, two runners-up and two special mentions on Hunger Mountain online soon!

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The Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize Winners Announced!

The winner of Hunger Mountain’s 2010 Creative Nonfiction Prize is Meredith Anton from West Dover, Vermont, for “Breathing Room on Judgment Day.” Runners-up are Joshua Doležal from Pella, Iowa, for “Uruguay,” and Cecilia Woloch from Los Angeles, California, for “Skin.” Melissa Febos was this year’s judge.

The finalists for this year’s Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize are:

• Sabine Bergmann of Mill Valley, California, for “Death Road”
• Vickie Fernandez of Philadelphia for “La Santera”
• Christine Ritenis of Suffern, New York, for “Masked Bandit”
• Catherine Taylor of Ithaca, New York, for “Three Planes”
• Brittany Young of Coconut Creek, Florida, for “Our Phantom Limbs”

Congratulations to Meredith, Joshua, Cecilia, and all of our finalists!

Katherine Paterson Prize Winners Announced!

The winner of Hunger Mountain’s 2010 Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing is Jaramy Conners from West Chazy, New York, for “Steve,” a short story for young adults. Runners-up are Jane Kohuth from Holliston, New York, for her picture book “Something at the Hill,” Marcia Popp from Edwardsville, Illinois, for her middle grade short story “The Ugliest Dog in the World,” and S. E. Sinkhorn from Santa Rosa, California, for “Chasing Shadows,” a short story for young adults. Holly Black was this year’s judge.

The finalists for this year’s Katherine Paterson Prize are:

• Elizabeth Coburn from Buffalo, New York, for “Clever Madchen” (Picture Book)
• Helen Hemphill from Nashville, Tennessee, for “The Direction of Fit” (YA, novel excerpt)
• Jennifer Kam from Syosset, New York, for “In a Flash” (Middle Grade, short story)
• Judy Irvin Kuns from Sandusky, Ohio, for “Exiled” (Middle Grade, short story)
• Hope Lindsay from Williston, Vermont, for “Two Grandmas Came to Play Today” (Picture Book)
• Annemarie O’Brien from Piedmont, California, for “Dance with Borzois” (Middle Grade, novel excerpt)
• Wendy Oleson from Lincoln, Nebraska, for “The Bean Summer” (Middle Grade, novel excerpt)
• Diane Stevens from Cambria, California, for “Don’t Tell Texas” (YA, novel excerpt)
• Mima Tipper from Burlington, Vermont, for “A Cut-Out Face” (YA, short story)
• Barbara Younger from Hillsborough, North Carolina, for “Christabel and Mr. Reader” (Picture Book)

Congratulations to Jaramy, Jane, Marcia, S. E. Sinkhorn, and all of our finalists!

Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize Winners Announced!

The winner of the 2010 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize at Hunger Mountain is Mojie Crigler from Turners Falls, Massachusetts, for her story “How the Film Flint Distorts the Truth.” Runners-up are Josie Sigler from Bar Harbor, Maine, for “A Man is Not a Star” and Duy Nguyen from Quincy, Massachusetts, for “My Lover Is a Former Fat Kid.” Steve Almond was this year’s judge. “How the Film Flint Distorts the Truth” and “A Man Is Not a Star” will appear in Hunger Mountain print issue #15: The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, due out this fall. Click here to order your copy.

The finalists for this year’s Howard Mosher Prize are:

• Colette Sartor from Los Angeles for “Dress Shoes”
• Jan Priddy from Cannon Beach, Oregon, for “Shooting Range”
• Eileen Sutton from New York City for “Hidden Heavens”
• Vanessa Blakeslee from Maitland, Florida, for “Welcome Lost Dogs”
• Jacqueline Guidry from Kansas City, Missouri, for “Who Are the Children”
• Julian Gonzales from Brooklyn, New York, for “The Last Dance”
• Jesse Goolsby from Colorado Springs, Colorado, for “Benevolence”

Congratulations to Mojie, Josie, Duy, and all the finalists!

Young Writers’ Prize Winners!

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

Ashley Seitz Kramer wins 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize!

We’re happy to announce that Ashley Seitz Kramer of Lakewood, Ohio has been awarded first place in the 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize for her poem “Between Land and Water.” This year’s judge, Matthew Dickman, author of All American Poem says:

It’s easy to praise this wonderful love poem. Like love itself it is full of the thingness of relationships, both the light and the dark and the meaningful moments in-between. As the title suggests there is so much happening between land and water where, if we are lucky, we are called “down to the floor/ like a starfish” our lover “loved once/ for too many arms”.

We’re also happy to announce two runners-up in the 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Congratulations to runner-up Nancy Pearson of Welfleet, Massachusetts for two poems, “Blackwater” and “Opening Day” about which, Mr. Dickman says:

“Political” poems can sometimes feel reactionary, distanced, and fearful. This is not the case with “Blackwater.”  This is a poem of the deepest kind of politic: the politic of the human dealing with an often times inhuman world. Here sincerity is being utilized as the muscle it is. The strange world of “Opening Day” might, in the hands of another poet, distance the reader. But here one feels anchored in this lyric world. Anchored and thankful to be in it.

Congratulations also to runner-up Samantha Kolber of Montpelier, Vermont for “Jewel Tones,” a  Pantoum (in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza.) “One of the many difficulties of writing in strict form is the pitfall of allowing the form of the poem to take over the content or the intention of the poet,” writes Matthew Dickman. “In “Jewel Tones” we see the opposite: A poet utilizing the form to carry the very human desire of the person writing it.”

The finalists for the 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize are:

• Helen Stevens Chinitz of Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York for “Estuarine”
• Sarah Eggers of Brooklyn, New York for “In which the young nun learns to prepare a stew”
• Stacy K. Heiney of Portland, Oregon for “Alone After Death”
• W. F.  Lantry of Silver Spring, Maryland for “Four Handed Lute”
• Kerrin McCadden of Plainfield, Vermont for “Definition” and “Becca”
• Leslie Anne Mcilroy of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for “Red Dog”
• Alison D. Moncrief of Burlington, Vermont for “Lock” and “Profusion”
• Renee Rossi of Dallas, Texas for “Tough Little Beauty”

Congratulations to Ashley, Nancy, Samantha, and all the finalists!