2012 Unified Literary Contest Winners (bios below)

FICTION (judged by Mary Gaitskill)
First Place: m k s volcofsky (Matthew Seidman) (Brooklyn, NY)
Second Place: Steinur Bell (Sarasota, FL)
Third Place: Aggie Zivaljevic (San Jose, CA)

POETRY (judged by Tony Hoagland)
First Place: Dianne Seuss (Kalamazoo, MI)
Second Place: Christopher Robinson (Federal Way, WA)
Third Place: Dawn Marie Knopf (Portland, OR)

NON-FICTION (judged by Ander Monson)
First Place: Will Mackin (Rio Rancho, NM)
Second Place: James Kates (Fitzwilliam, NH)
Third Place: Jim Ruland (San Diego, CA)

Mr. Volcofsky and Ms. Seuss will have their work published in print in the Black Warrior Review, and online in The Walrus. Additionally, they will have the choice of attending (airfare, tuition, and housing included) any one of the SLS-2012 programs. Mr. Bell and Mr. Robinson will receive a full tuition waiver for the program of their choice, and publication in online magazine Joyland (fiction) and Branch (poetry). Ms. Zivaljevic and Ms. Knopf will receive a 60% tuition discount and publication in Joyland (fiction) and Branch (poetry). Mr. Mackin will be published in DIAGRAM, and will have the choice of attending (airfare, tuition, and housing included) any one of the SLS-2012 programs. Mr. Kates will receive a full tuition waiver for the program of their choice, and Mr. Ruland will receive a 60% tuition discount.

The Center for Fiction Award (The Literarian)
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint (San Jose, CA)
Runners-up: Stacy Hardy & Margaret Meklin

Ms. Myint will receive full tuition for any 2012 SLS Program, as well as $500 towards travel, and publication in The Center for Fiction's online journal, The Literarian. Ms. Hardy and Ms. Meklin will receive a 60% tuition discount for the program of their choice.

Graywolf Prize
Snowden Wright (New York, NY)
Runners-up: Rachel Cantor, Diana Svennes-Smith, Emma Smith-Stevens, & Laura Pritchett

Mr. Wright will receive full tuition for any 2012 SLS Program, as well as $500 towards travel and publication on the Graywolf website.

SLS-St. Petersburg Review Award
Gabriel Tallent, Ashley Wren Collins, Justin Boening, & Cori A. Winrock

The winners will receive publication in the St. Petersburg Review as well as free tuition to an upcoming program.

SLS Award for Emerging Writers
Karina Slobogian, Ottessa Moshfegh, & Eric Fershtman

The winners will receive full tuition for any 2012 SLS Program, and consideration
for publication by one of our contest partners.

WINNER BIOS

FICTION WINNERS

m k s volcofsky (Matthew Seidman) - Brooklynite.  His fiction recently appeared in H.O.W. Journal #8.  Current works in progress:  Letter To A Story [a], a novel; A Sacred Misunderstanding, a collection of portrait fictions; and Sawˈdad(ʒ)I, a film-script in collaboration with photographer Theresa Ortolani.  Presently focused on works for the page & screen.  Since 1995 nine of his works for the stage have been performed, under his and others' direction - on stages in NYC, Berlin's Haus der Kunst der Welt, and The National Museum, Trinidad, West Indies; his video work has been seen in NYC & in festivals in Lisbon & Faro, PT, his visual art has been seen in solo & group shows and is in private collections in the US, Europe & Japan.  The work can be seen & read at mksvolcofsky.com- A' Traveling Yeshiva Sideshow, his roaming silo in the cloud

Steinur Bell’s fiction has appeared in Agni Online, Hotel Amerika, Puerto del Sol, The South Carolina Review, and others. He received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and now lives in Sarasota, Florida, with his wife and two daughters, and is working on a novel. 

 

 

Aggie Zivaljevic grew up in Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. She's the recipient of three scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has appeared in Narrative magazine, Crab Orchard Review and Speakeasy. Her short story “Village at the Bottom of the Lake,” an excerpt from a novel-in-progress, was a finalist for Sherwood Anderson Short Fiction Award, given by Mid-American Review. Her story "Where Is My Boy?" was recognized by Narrative Magazine as one of the five best for the year 2010. Aggie lives in San Jose, CA.

 

POETRY WINNERS

Diane Seuss's most recent collection, Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, received the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2010.  She has published widely, with recent work appearing in The Missouri Review, Poetry, Tar River Poetry, Blackbird  and Ecotone.  She received the Cultural Center of Cape Cod Poetry Prize in 2011 and has been selected to teach the Advanced Seminar at The Frost Place in New Hampshire in the summer of 2012.  Seuss is Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, USA

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Christopher Robinson is a writer, teacher and translator currently living in the wind. He earned his MA in poetry from Boston University and his MFA from Hunter College. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Alaska Quarterly Review, Night Train, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Chiron Review, Umbrella Factory, Flatman Crooked, McSweeney’s Online, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Sante Fe Art Institute, the Lanesboro Arts Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has been a finalist for numerous prizes, including the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize.

 

Dawn Marie Knopf was born and raised in Yosemite National Park, Ca. Her poems and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming with the Boston Review, Bomb, Black Warrior Review, the New Inquiry, and JERRY, among others. She is the former editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, published by Columbia University.

 

 

 

 

NON-FICTION WINNERS

Will Mackin lives in New Mexico with his wife and two kids.  He plans to retire from the Navy and roam the earth, starting with Lithuania.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

J. (James) Kates born in 1945, in White Plains, New York, volunteered for the Mississippi Summer Project after his freshman year at Wesleyan University, and spent that summer helping to implement a special court order encouraging voter registration in Panola County. In the fall of 1964, he organized a Friends of SNCC/COFO in Paris, France, to support the work of the American civil-rights movement. He returned to Mississippi in 1965, working in Natchez, and later became a public school teacher, a nonviolence trainer for interpersonal and political movements, a poet and a literary translator. Since 1997, he has co-directed the non-profit literary publishing house Zephyr Press, publishers of Letters from Mississippi: Reports from Civil Rights Volunteers & Poetry of the 1964 Freedom Summer.

 

A veteran of the Navy, Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome, a book reviewer for San Diego CityBeat, and a pop culture columnist for Razorcake. He is the curator and host of Vermin on the Mount, an irreverent reading series now in its eighth year with events in Los Angeles and San Diego. He works for an entertainment and production company on an Indian reservation in Southern California.

 

 

The Center for Fiction Award (The Literarian)

Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint graduated from Brown University in 2011 with a B.A. in Literary Arts and International Relations. Her short stories have appeared in Caketrain, The Kenyon Review Online, The Bicycle Review, Adj Noun Magazine and various Brown-RISD literary journals. She will be spending April 2012 as an artist-in-residence at Hedgebook on Whidbey Island, Washington.

 

 

 

Runners-up: Stacy Hardy & Margaret Meklin

Graywolf Prize

Snowden Wright holds a BA in Creative Writing from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. His nonfiction work has been published at The Atlantic (online), The Morning News, Thought Catalog, The Good Men Project, Esquire (online), Bookslut, The Millions, Nerve, Salon, and the New York Daily News. His fiction has been published at Dark Sky, The L Magazine (online), Emprise Review, elimae, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Wright has been the recipient of the Alexander Laing Memorial Award for Screenwriting, the Ivy Film Festival Award for Short Screenplay, the Ivy Film Festival Award for Feature-Length Screenplay, and the Sidney Cox Memorial Prize for Short Story Writing. He lives in New York City.

Runners-up: Rachel Cantor, Diana Svennes-Smith, Emma Smith-Stevens, & Laura Pritchett

SLS-St. Petersburg Review Award

Gabriel Tallent was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico and grew up in Mendocino, California. He received a BA from Willamette University with a focus on eighteenth-century literature. In the summer he leads a youth crew doing trail work in Washington and eastern Oregon. In the winter he lives in Salt Lake City.

 

Ashley Wren Collins is a published author, journalist, producer, choreographer, host, and actress.  She received her BA in English and Theatre Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the American Repertory Theater/Moscow Art Theatre School Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University.  Ashley is the co-author of Produce Your Own Damn Movie! (Focal Press 2009), and the author of The Cheap Bastard’s Guide to Los Angeles (Globe Pequot Press 2011), both of which received rave reviews.  She is currently at work on a novel that will be the first book in a trilogy. Ashley is slated to make her directorial debut with the short film, The Aftertaste of Cigarettes, which will shoot later this year.  You can learn more about Ashley by visiting her website at www.ashleywrencollins.com.

Justin Boening will be Bucknell’s Philip Roth Resident for 2012-2013. He is an Associate Editor at Poetry Northwest, and the Editor of Acquisitions at YesYes Books. He has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Summer Literary Seminars. He was recently a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and was this year's runner-up for the "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Vinyl Poetry, and elimae, among others.

Cori A. Winrock’s poems have appeared in (or are waiting in the wings of) the Best New Poets anthology, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, From the Fishouse, & elsewhere. Her work was chosen as Editor’s Choice for The Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award and as an honorable mention for Copper Nickel’s poetry prize. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Individual Artist Grant and was an Emerging Writer Fellow at Kingston University in London, UK. Her manuscript has been a finalist for a number of prizes including the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award and the Kore Press First Book Award. She received her MFA from Cornell University and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Geneseo.

SLS Award for Emerging Writers
Karina Slobogian, Ottessa Moshfegh, & Eric Fershtman (bios forthcoming)

 

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CONTEST JUDGES

Fiction Judge: Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, and Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and L.A. Times Book Award. She is the author of the story collections Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner in 1998. Her newest collection of stories is titled Don’t Cry (2009). Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader. The film received the Special Jury Prize, and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction. She has taught at U-C Berkeley, the University of Houston, New York University, Brown and Syracuse University. Mary Gaitskill was born in 1954 in Lexington, Kentucky. In 1981 Gaitskill graduated from the University of Michigan, where she won an award for her collection of short fiction The Woman Who Knew Judo and Other Stories.

Poetry Judge: Tony Hoagland's latest book of poems, Unincorporated Persons In The Late Honda Dynasty, was published by Graywolf Press in 2010. His recognitions include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the O.B. Hardisson Award, and the Mark Twain Award, for humor in American Poetry. His previous collection, What Narcissism Means To Me, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award in poetry in 2004. In 2005 his book of essays about poetry and craft, called Real Sofistakashun, was published by Graywolf. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson low residency MFA program.

 

Non Fiction Judge: Ander Monson is the author of a number of paraphernalia including a website, a decoder wheel, several chapbooks, as well as five books, most recently Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf Press, 2010) and The Available World (Sarabande Books, 2010). He lives in Tucson where he teaches at the University of Arizona and edits the journal DIAGRAM <thediagram.com> and the New Michigan Press.

 

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Our 2013 Contest will be launched in the fall. Thank you to everyone who participated!

 

 

2011 Winners

Fiction, judged by Jayne-Anne Phillips

First Place: Blair Bourassa (Kentville, NS)
Second Place: Matthew Baker (Nashville, TN)
Third Place: Rebecca Rukeyser (Iowa City, IA)

Poetry, judged by Matthew Zapruder

First Place: Lillian Bertram (Williamstown, MA)
Second Place: Chloe Honum (Provincetown, MA)
Third Place: Justin Boening (Missoula, MT)

East-European Roots Contest, judged by Phillip Lopate

First Place: Nikita Nelin "The Most Current History of the Russian Jew"
Second Place: Daniella Gitlin "Notes From the Basin"
Third Place: (tie) Steven Roiphe "Brighton Beach Memory Gap" & Randall Babtkis "Three Meditations"

2010 Winners:

Poetry, judged by Mary Jo Bang

First Place: Helen Dimos
Second Place: Hadara Bar-Nadav
Third Place: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
 
Fiction, judged by Mary Gaitskill

First Place: Gina Frangello
Second Place: Mikael Awake
Third Place: Geoff Schmidt

2009 Winners:

Poetry, judged by Ann Lauterbach

First Place: Caron A. Levis
Second Place: Rachel Cantor
Third Place: Lisa Gornick
 
Fiction, judged by Lynne Tillman

First Place: Elizabeth Senja Spackman
Second Place: Ravi Shankar
Third Place: Michael C. Peterson

SLS/Matrix Magazine Editor's Choice Award: Mona Awad

 

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