Results for the Annual Cupboard contest
MEET our winner!
Sara Ryan
Excellent Evidence of Human Activity
Of Ryan's prose, Judge Kelly Sundberg writes, “Excellent Evidence of Human Activity is a lyrically taut meditation on pain, the natural world, and above all, mortality. The narrator writes of sharp teeth, bee stingers, a knife through a turtle's back. Penetration in this world is suffering. Still, the reflections on pain and mortality exhibit something else: to feel pain is to live. Written in eleven short segments, the language in Excellent Evidence of Human Activity carries the rhythm of poetry as the narrative unfolds into a stunning finale.”
SARA RYAN received her MFA from Northern Michigan University where she was an associate poetry editor for Passages North. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Pleiades, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, Yemassee, Booth, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain and others. She was the winner of Grist Journal's 2018 Pro Forma Contest, and is the author of the chapbook Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press). She is currently pursuing her PhD at Texas Tech University and reading poetry for Iron Horse Literary Review.
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Excellent Evidence of Human Activity will debut in the Spring of 2019.
AND OUR editors' choices
| Along with the winner we have chosen two more manuscripts to receive $200 and publication in 2019 |
Alyssa Quinn
Dante's Cartography
ALYSSA QUINN earned her MFA from Western Washington University and is currently working on her PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah, where she is also an editor for the journal Quarterly West. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Brevity, Gingerbread House, Sweet, Frontier Poetry, Punctuate, and elsewhere. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah with her partner and her two cats, Calliope and Zeno.
Samuel Rafael Barber's
Thousands of Shredded Scraps of Paper Located Across five Landfills, when Pieced Together to form a Message
SAMUEL RAFAEL BARBER'S stories have appeared in or are forthcoming from DIAGRAM, Green Mountains Review, Puerto del Sol, Tammy, and Yalobusha Review, among other journals. He has an MFA from the University of Arizona and an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. According to life expectancy tables, he will live another 57.2 years. For now, you can find him at samuelrafaelbarber.com and somewhere within a certain American city where he teaches AP Seminar to teenagers who are coming for us all.