Announcing the Winners of the Kim Barnes Prize
We’re excited to announce the winners of the Kim Barnes Prize, a special 2021 contest celebrating our friend, mentor, colleague, and beloved writer Kim Barnes!
The contest was judged blind by Kim herself and asked for submissions inspired by one of her favorite prompts:
Everyone has a knife (or hatchet, razor, glass shard, chisel, scalpel) story—a narrative of puncture in which a sharp object cuts the skin. Or almost does. Or could. Whether real or imagined, this cut ruptures the barrier between inside and outside, blood and air, self and other. This is what Kim Barnes calls the “third sphere” in writing: a space of encounter, intensity, and vulnerability where something new can happen. For this contest, submit a short story or essay (max. 3,000 words) that combines the narrative drama of a knife story (the exterior) with a thinking and questioning narrator (the interior). How do we produce meaning when one meets the other, when the self is opened, punctured, or laid bare to outside forces?
Winner
Rain Wright—”Forgetting Nouns”
Of Wright’s piece, Kim Barnes says:
I read “Forgetting Nouns” in a swoon, and now I know why: with its devastating details, synesthetic imagery, and brilliant use of metaphor, it is a transcendental romance—a love letter to the Oversoul. Wright weaves a potent spell that magically ruptures the membrane between the inner self and the outer world and cuts through our mortal sense of time. The landscape holds memory both immediate and ancient. Joy, grief, and desire well from the same inevitable wound. What holds at the center is story embodied, told in a language so vivid that we “watch for the sound of it in the air.”
Rain Wright received her Ph.D. in English with a focus in creative writing from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. She currently teaches writing at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa as a lecturer. Twice nominated for Best of the Net, Rain has been published in Hawai’i Review, Mud Season Review, Connotations Press: An Online Artifact, Madras Magazine, Summit Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Entropy Magazine, Dreamers, The Pinch Journal, After Happy Hour Journal, Arc Journal, and has work forthcoming in Minerva Rising. She won the 2014 University of Hawai‘i at Manoa Biography Prize for her work A Way With Water.
Runner-Up
Kathryn Wilder—“The Truth I Cannot Tell”
Of Wilder’s piece, Kim Barnes says:
“The Truth I Cannot Tell” exists in a place of in-betweens: between the speaker and her adult son; between the “before and after” of her life; between guilt and blame; between the skin and the blood beneath; and, finally, between life and death. Elements of masquerading and mistaken identity complicate and enrich a fixating narrative of winter calving until, finally, the motifs peel away to reveal the more startling truths at the heart of the essay: a tenuous escape from a destructive past; a ravaging desire to live free from pain; and an empathy so sharp that it cuts to the bone.
Kathryn Wilder is the author of Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West, which Kirkus Reviews calls a "testimony to the healing power of wildness." Wilder's essays have been cited in Best American Essays and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in many publications including High Desert Journal, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, and Sierra, among others. She lives with mustangs and Criollo cattle in southwestern Colorado.
An enormous thank you to Kim Barnes for inspiring and judging this contest, and for everything she’s added (and continues to add) to our literary lives and community.
Thank you, too, to all those who submitted their work to this special contest! We were excited to review so many generous and beautiful pieces, which were judged blind to ensure integrity. The winner will receive a $500 prize and be published in our Summer/Fall 2021 print issue, Fugue 61. Look out for the issue this coming September.
If you’re interested in reading about the winners of our 2021 annual contest, you can find them here!
