Winners Announced!
2011 Prize for Young Writers at Hunger Mountain
Dear young writers,
This year’s entries to the Hunger Mountain prize for young writers were impressive for several reasons. Many of you seemed to be taking risks with form and content. Your work was rife with startling imagery and hypnotic sound. I appreciated the level of insight, the exquisiteness of observation in this year’s creative nonfiction. I admired the poets who experimented with form—sestina and villanelle! I was impressed with the young fiction writers who dialogued with the existing body of literature by reimagining well-known characters (Alice in Wonderland!). I enjoyed the humor, fantasy, and suspense. I reflected on extended metaphors. I entered dark, dystopian worlds. I was swept up in quirky love stories.
Above all, I was impressed by the earnestness and honesty of this year’s entrants. You all seem to have a real reverence for the written word and for narrative form.
It was so tough to choose only a handful of finalists, and several favorites didn’t make it into the pile of finalists—although they were read and enjoyed thoroughly. I hope all of you will continue to write, will heed Sylvia Plath’s fun advice:
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
You’ve all got the imagination. You’ve got the guts. You’ve got the creativity. Next comes practice—and persistence. Good luck to you all!
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.
First place winner in fiction:
- Lin King “Rumor Has it in Winthrop”
First place winner in poetry:
- Delali Ayivor “Threshold” and “The Office”
First place winner in creative nonfiction:
- Sophie Haigney “What You Can Tell From My Childhood Heroes: Feminism and Other Things”
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Runner-up in fiction:
- Alexandria Juliet Lenzi “The Lost and Found Tale of Tod’s Invisible Jacket”
Runner-up in poetry:
- Cara Dorris “Spring Cleaning”
Runner-up in creative nonfiction:
- Danny Rothschild “Unrooted”
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Special Mention in poetry:
- Annalee Kwochka “Period”
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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)
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Congratulations to all the winners! You really inspired me this year!
Congrats to all of the above-mentioned writers! Hopefully we’ll see all of you in print in the near future!
Huge congrats to all the winners and finalists! I can’t wait to read some of this work.
Wow!!! Impressive. Extra happy to see one of my students as a finalist! She blossoms like a rose.
fantastic!!!
Congratulations to all winners, runners-up, and finalists! Special congrats to my student, Alyssa Clark. Way to make your teacher proud!