Announcing the Winners of the 2021 Writing Contest
We’re excited to officially announce the winners of our 2021 Writing Contest, as chosen by guest judges Eloghosa Osunde and Leila Chatti!
Prose Winner
Emma Brankin—“The Scandals of Christendom”
Eloghosa Osunde selected Brankin’s piece:
For its imagination, character, beauty, and the protagonist’s lifeforce.
Emma Brankin is a drama tutor and teacher from Glasgow, Scotland. She recently graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London with a Masters in Creative Writing and Education. Her work can be found in places such as XRAY Literary Magazine, Maudlin House, and Drunk Monkeys. Catch her tweeting about her cat, old 00s TV shows, and Tim Curry's acting career at @emmanya.
Poetry Winner
Jeanne Morel— “Loss & Other Forms of Death”
Of Morel’s piece, Leila Chatti says:
So much, this year, has been lost; after a year of immense, overwhelming grief, this quiet poem reads like the quiet following the riot of a long-raging storm. I appreciate the tension in this poem, its precision and spareness of language, its “terse presence.”
Jeanne Morel is the author of the chapbooks I See My Way to Some Partial Results (forthcoming from Ravenna Press), Jackpot (Bottlecap Press), and That Crossing Is Not Automatic (Tarpaulin Sky Press). She holds an MFA from Pacific University and has taught poetry in arts organizations, retirement communities, and prisons. Jeanne lives in Seattle where she teaches writing at Bellevue College and is a gallery guide at the Frye Art Museum.
Prose Runner-Up
Whitney Lee—“Delivering the News”
Of Lee’s piece, Osunde says:
This essay handles the truth of grief and (study of) the body with gentleness. In it, the writer works through important questions about medicine, being a person, and what it takes to keep the light on inside. I enjoyed reading it.
Whitney Lee is a Maternal Fetal Medicine physician, an Assistant Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Northwestern University, former OpEd Public Voices fellow, and veteran. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Booth, Typehouse, Lunch Ticket, The Rumpus, Crack the Spine, Gravel, Numéro Cinq, and others. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Agency Literary Award. She lives in Chicago with her husband and four children. Currently, she is working on a memoir about a physician’s experience with uncertainty and perfectionism.
Poetry Runner-Up
Trevor Ketner—“[It is for fear to wet a widow's eye]”
Of Ketner’s piece, Chatti says:
I am fascinated by this poem, how it leads me into unknowingness and discovery. A good poem has a bit of magic, a mystery it doesn’t fully reveal. I delight in this poem’s strange wonder, its unruliness, and how it pushes the reader and writer both to meet it on its own terms.
Trevor Ketner is the author of [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021) selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander. They have been published in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Best New Poets, New England Review, Ninth Letter, West Branch, Pleiades, Diagram, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. A 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow, they have been a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow for The Poetry Project (selected by Wayne Koestenbaum), and a Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow. They hold an MFA from the University of Minnesota and live in Manhattan with their husband.
Prose Finalists
Star Su—”Kun”
Gloriah Amondi—”What to Do with Unreturned Love in Nairobi”
Poetry Finalists
Hannah Smith—”A Spectacle in Hill Country”
Gail DiMaggio—”Metta for Pia Ramini”
Madeleine Mori—”G(LOSS)OLALIA”
Duncan Slagle—”TRANS GIRLS LOVE KETAMINE”
Constance Hansen—”Artist’s Statement”
Matthew Kelsey—”The Purchase”
Aileen Keown Vaux—”Dark Matter”
Annie Quigley—”Collected Objects”
Thanks so much to our wonderful judges and everyone who submitted to our annual writing contest!
Winners receive $1,000, and both winners and runners-up will be published in the upcoming print issue of Fugue. This year, we received a notably large number of submissions, and our editors and judges enjoyed examining them all with care.
We look forward to reading what everyone has been working on this summer once our general submission period re-opens on August 1st, 2021. Be sure to keep an eye out for these pieces in our next print issue, Fugue 61!
