Announcing the Winners of the 2023 Writing Contests
We’re very excited to announce the winners of our 2023 writing contests, as chosen by guest judges Lidia Yuknavitch and Kaveh Akbar!
Prose Winner
Eun Yoon — “My Name and Other Names”
Lidia Yuknavitch writes:
“When a name and a language are lost, the danger is that the loss dislocates a person from their own identity, family and culture. The space of loss is the body. The body carries new meanings and old meanings and grief as a person invents her own way to survive. I will remember this story for a very long time, stitched as it is through people and places.”
Eun Yoon is a writer who lives in Chicago, IL. She is a current MFA student at Northwestern University, studying creative nonfiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Reed Magazine, Event, and elsewhere.
Poetry Winner
AJ White — “Full Disclosure”
Kaveh Akbar writes:
“I love the way “Full Disclosure” illuminates the finding inside losing, the collection inside recollection. “Say that time & absence press by magnitude, not, as we’re told, by direction” —how this poet deftly resists the intoxicating impulse to qualify experience, to flatten it to a mere theme. Here experience sings truthfully, full-throatedly, usefully broadening and complicating our vision.”
AJ White is a poet and educator from north Georgia who holds degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he was the 2019–2020 Levis Reading Prize Fellow, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. He lives in central New York, where he is a doctoral student at SUNY Binghamton.
Prose Runner-Up
Gracie Newman — “Local Creatures”
Lidia Yuknavitch writes:
“The lore and lyric of this beautifully strange story weave their way between bodies like waters that may drown or delight the people who inhabit this place. Where there is death there is also desire; where there is a community there is also the possibility of its undoing. I loved the fresh dip into coming of age, into layers of place, environment, animals and liminality.”
Gracie Newman is a writer from Buffalo, NY. She is currently a fellow in fiction at the Michener Center at UT Austin. She has a degree in English from Stanford University, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Joyland, and elsewhere.
Poetry Runner-Up
Jackson Burgess — “Carl”
Kaveh Akbar writes:
“Having read and fallen in love with “Carl,” I feel “Of course I am frightened” might be the only truly honest way to open a poem in 2023. One thing happens, then the next. Hilarious, terrifying, pulverizingly mundane. This poem feels like being alive.”
Jackson Burgess is the author of Atrophy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018), Pocket Full of Glass (Tebot Bach, 2017), and a novel-in-progress. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and USC, he’s placed poems and stories in The Los Angeles Review, The Cimarron Review, Tin House, Joyland, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.
Thanks so much to our wonderful judges and everyone who submitted to our annual writing contest!
Winners receive $1,000, and both winners and runners-up will be published in the 2024 print issue of Fugue. This year, we received a notably large number of submissions, and our editors and judges enjoyed examining them all with care.
