Winners

Poetry
2011 Adam Day (nominated by Erica Wright of Guernica)

From the judges citation: “Adam Day’s exceptional talent manifests itself in lyric outbursts, clever figures of speech, and a conceit capable of sustaining an extended sequence. He adopts the badger as his protagonist, just as Ted Hughes favored the crow, and begins with an account, arresting in its strangeness, of how ‘the Gods’ built ‘bodies, like Badger’s.’ After pouring ‘the eyes in with a ladle,’ they ‘sprinkle / hair onto bald, moist limbs and faces, / like boiled potatoes.’ If one test of a young poet’s skill is the freshness of his similes, Day aces the exam. The priest who touched a boy in his ‘special place’ exposed his own ‘little man—like the neck of a goose / tethered to a telephone pole.’

‘Elegy from His Children’ elevates the sentence fragment to a rhetorical maneuver at the service of an obituary: ‘Retired professor / of androgyny. Premature evacuation. Made cats / laugh. Fought walls. Red-bearded hyena’s ghost.’ When, in a third poem, Badger speaks for himself, it is with pungent wit. ‘I was a member / of the Yachats Communist Party for a time, / initially to meet women / as liberal with their bodies / as with their politics. Eventually, / I embraced Marxism, which is to say / I had lingering doubts / about my masculinity.’ Perhaps others could have written the first of these sentences. But it took nerve and imagination to leap into the second

Day is unafraid to conjoin historical and fictional personages for effects that startle and provoke, as in ‘Combine,’ in which Stalin, Goya, Queen Anne, and Tennessee Williams are among the cast of characters. Impressive, too, is the poem in which Day juxtaposes excerpts ‘From an Interview with Kenzaburo Oe, with Stage Directions from Synge’s Riders to the Sea.’

This poet’s technical prowess, adventurousness, and wide-ranging curiosity give pleasure now and the promise of a great deal more to come.”

Runner up
Brett Fletcher Lauer (nominated by Robert Casper of jubilat)

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Fiction
2011 Smith Henderson (nominated by Hannah Tinti of One Story)

From the judges citation: “Like the crackling, codified radio frequencies of its title, Smith Henderson’s story ‘Number Stations’ reads like a haunting, echoing warning shot into the night. Ostensibly a portrait of tangled relationships in Bigfork, Montana—of a parolee trying to begin again, of a man trapped by a fatal secret, of a girl who loves him in spite of herself—Henderson’s prose transcends this domestic scrum with its ferociously precise lyricism, the stuttering canter-step of its dialogue, the depth of its damaged, wanting characters. More than anything, though, the reader will be taken by the surprise of the language. From the very first line, we are wowed by Henderson’s choices, particularly the slippery, sleight-of-hand of his diction (‘He gave her a longsuffering grin.’). The fantastical moments in this story, carved so deftly with his fine brushstroke, never lapse into heavy-handed sensationalism—always we get the sense that Henderson knows exactly, exactly what he is doing, and that his uncanny conjurations will later be mined to form the emotional core of something spectacular. Indeed, who else could render an ostrich running through a Montana snowstorm with such soft, subtle hands so that the scene becomes heartbreaking, hopeless, true? This is the kind of story that will wrestle a reader into reading differently, and it most certainly serves as the announcement of a writer who has much to teach us. Smith Henderson, once emergent, has arrived. We should all tune in.”

Runner up
Elliott Holt (nominated by Joel Whitney of Guernica)

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Nonfiction
2011 David Stuart MacLean (nominated by Ladette Randolph of Ploughshares)

From the judges citation: “In his riveting personal essay, ‘The Answer to the Riddle is Me,’ David Stuart MacLean writes with exceptional clarity about a most incoherent subject. While studying on a Fulbright in India, MacLean suffered Lariam-induced amnesia, forgetting where he came from, what he was doing in India, and most of the people in his life. MacLean writes in terse, taut prose that juxtaposes, and so highlights, the internal chaos of this extremely unusual event. Perhaps even more notable than the unity and clarity of the prose is its effortless pacing. The essay immediately delves into the mystery of MacLean’s memory loss (‘On October 13, 2002, I woke up in a train station in Secunderabad, India with no passport and no idea who I was . . . ‘), and then methodically reconstructs what the world looks and feels like in this disoriented state. Though the origin of the amnesia gets sorted out, the questions it puts in motion have deeper implications, implications that haunt long after the piece ends. MacLean’s ability to grapple with both the facts and the emotions of a circumstance in a tight, suspenseful narrative suggests a rich and auspicious future for him.”

Runner up
Chester Phillips (nominated by Hattie Fletcher of Creative Nonfiction)

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Participating journals for 2011: 6 x 6, A Public Space, Bloom, Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fence, Gargoyle, Glimmer Train, Guernica, Harvard Review, jubilat, Kenyon Review, Lungfull!, New York Quarterly, One Story, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, Spinning Jenny, and Tin House.

2011 Judges: Reif Larsen, David Lehman, Robin Romm