By |

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is randalowain.jpg
Photo by Amie LeeKing

We are thrilled to announce that Carter Sickels will award the 2020 Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Carter’s novel The Prettiest Star is forthcoming from Hub City Press in 2020. He is the author of the novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury 2012), an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His essays and fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guernica, and the Bellevue Literary Review. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University, where he teaches in the Bluegrass Writers low-residency MFA program.

Things to do today:

Read the 2019 #BarnhillPrize-winning essay here:  
Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer

By |

Tomorrow we announce the winner! Here are all 10 essays in case you have an office pool or Fantasy Writers League going . . . congratulations again to these outstanding essayists.

Neema Avashia (Boston), A Hindu Hillbilly Elegy
Rochelle Harris Cox (Northwest GA), North Georgia Gothic
Dorian Fox (Boston), The Fence
Jenna Korsmo (Tuscon), Sister-Cats
Jessica Langlois (Atlanta), Ways to Die in Alabama
Elizabeth Lantz (Columbus), The Imaginary Writer
Mary J. Mahoney (New York), Suburbs Plagued by Foraging Deer
Elizabeth Muller (New Jersey), The Revival of the Fittest
Laura Stanfill (Portland OR), Birdsong in the Key of Brain Injury
Lisa López Smith (Central Mexico), Turning 37

I give thanks for baptism in symbol.
The deep blue covering every need—
watery armor against despair—
praise the groundswell of heartbeat.

Word incarnate, Word divine,
holy place of print,
create in me,
break me.

from “Keep the Feast” by Anne Clinard Barnhill, a poem in Coal, Baby