Thursday, August 05, 2010

Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award winners announced

Judging for this year's Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award is at last complete. Congratulations to the winning authors: Amina Gautier of Chicago, IL for her manuscript "At Risk" and Melinda Moustakis of Kalamazoo, MI for "Bear Down, Bear North." Both collections will be published by the University of Georgia Press and should be available next fall.

Meanwhile, the winning collections from last year's competition, THE DANCE BOOTS by Linda Legarde Grover and PLEASE COME BACK TO ME by Jessica Treadway, are very near release and will be available by September 15.

The award exists to help readers discover wonderful new writers and call attention to the short story as a worthy genre; it has led to the publication of more than fifty short story collections since 1983.

The judges named a runner up in this year's competition, E. J. Levy of Washington, DC. Congratulations also to this year’s finalists: L. Annette Binder of Los Angeles, CA; Charles Blackburn, Jr. of Raleigh, NC; William H. Coles of Salt Lake City, UT; Justin Courter of Sunnyside, NY; Valerie Fioravanti of Sacramento, CA; Natalie Harris of Waterville, ME; Nick Healy of Mankato, MN; Jeff P. Jones of Moscow, ID; Christiana Louisa Langenberg of Huxley, IA; Kelly Luce of Santa Cruz, CA; Michael McGuire of La Manzanilla de la Paz, Jalisco, Mexico; Robert McKean of Newton, MA; Janna McMahan of Columbia, SC; Nicholas Montemarano of Lancaster, PA; Maryanne O’Hara of Ashland, MA; Nicole Louise Reid of Newburgh, IN; Richard Sonnenmoser of Maryville, MO; Carol Test of Phoenix, AZ; Paul Vidich of New York, NY; Anthony Wallace of Brookline, MA; and Gregory Wolos of Alplaus, NY.