It is our great pleasure to announce that Kevin Hershey is the 2023 winner of The Anne C. Barnhill Prize for Creative Nonfiction. His essay, Three Fairies, was an early favorite in the submission process, and was named the best of the best by contest judge Neema Avashia. Avashia writes:

It was such a pleasure to judge this year’s Barnhill Prize submissions. The writers who submitted this year took on a wide range of topics: from intergenerational trauma to interactions with nature to complex family relationships to evolving understandings of queerness. I’m grateful to these writers for their courage in putting truth on the page, for the care and craft with which they did so.

I’m a parent to a relatively new daughter, and I marvel almost every day at the joy she takes in seeing herself in the mirror. She revels in her own appearance, her own existence, with a kind of unabashed glory that both fills me with joy, and gives me some existential angst. Because, what happens when she stops looking at herself that way? Who or what will make her stop seeing herself as a thing of beauty? And how will I stand beside her in the moments where she loses sight of herself because of the messages the world gives her?

The essay “Three Fairies” resonated for me deeply because of the way in which it interacted with my questions. The writer’s detailed descriptions of this group of young boys who loved to dress up as the fairies from Sleeping Beauty, who delighted in capes and hats and wands, and who were supported in doing so by their moms, reminded me of my daughter’s early delight. And their reckoning with their own identity in a world that is not always kind, reminded me of my own. But what stayed with me most by the end of the piece was the way in which the adult writer is able to see his mother, and his best friend’s mother, so clearly: to see that the care and welcome they extended to their children did not just stop there–it extended to the queer community around them. That what he’d thought of as a child as a manifestation of his mother’s love was that, but also so much more–it was a manifestation of her commitment to a broader community of queer folks.

The emotional arc in “Three Fairies” is rendered so skillfully that by the end of the piece, I was filled with a deep love for the characters within it–the boys, and their mothers. The same love that the author was intending to communicate through the writing. The narrative clarity, the precision of language, and the author’s own vulnerability on the page, all led me to choose it as the winner of this year’s Barnhill Prize.

Neema Avashia

Neema also named as notable Lost at Sea (Harley).

Congratulations to Kevin, and to each of our finalists. On behalf of our editorial team, we are humbled and grateful to have the opportunity to read your work; most of all, you contributed to the dream of honoring Anne Barnhill by offering poignant and powerful narratives from your childhood experience.

Please see our home page or Creative Nonfiction menu tab for links to all of our essays, and thank you!

Kevin Hershey is a writer, early childhood educator, and graduate student of clinical social work. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Crab Creek Review, and Open Global Rights. He lives in New York City.