Announcing the Winners of Bellingham Review’s 2021 Literary Contests
We are pleased to announce the winners of Bellingham Review‘s 2021 literary awards—the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction—selected by contest judges Jessica Jacobs, Sarah Einstein, and Kristiana Kahakauwila, respectively. The winners will each receive an award of $1,000 and will be published in the Spring 2022 print issue of Bellingham Review.
49th Parallel Award for Poetry
Andrea Hollander is the winner of the 2021 49th Parallel Award for Poetry for her poem “The Thinking.” Contest judge Jessica Jacobs had this to say about the piece: “Amid a group of powerful finalists, each poem worthy and arresting in its own way, Andrea Hollander’s kept drawing me back—and stayed with me long after I’d again read the final line. One of the things I’ve always loved best about reading is how it often feels like the closest you can get to witnessing the working of another person’s mind. To read ‘The Thinking’ is to witness the mind of a speaker writing and then revising a complex ars poetica in real-time, grappling with the very nature of thinking, with how the act of writing a memory simultaneously rewrites it while changing nothing about the event itself—all while managing to capture these heady concepts in a sensual, deeply embodied poem.”
Andrea Hollander moved to Portland, Oregon in 2011 after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for 15 years and the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for 22. Hollander’s 5th full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her 4th was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her 1st won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction) and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017, she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducts in her home (and since March 2020 on Zoom). Her website is www.andreahollander.net.
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
Lisa Nikolidakis is the winner of the 2021 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Whale Song for the Weary.” Contest judge Sarah Einstein had this to say about the piece: “Lisa Nikolidakis’s ‘Whale Song For the Weary’ is a stunning essay exploring both what it means to live in a body with chronic illness and what it means to live in a world going through so many shared horrors: the pandemic; the extrajudicial murder of Black people by the police; the refugee crisis. It’s both timely and timeless. We all have a whale song; Nikolidakis’s is particularly poignant.”
Lisa Nikolidakis‘ work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Hunger Mountain, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Salt Hill, The Rumpus, Nimrod, Gulf Coast Online, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing in the Midwest.
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
Keya Mitra is the winner of the 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for her story “Immigrant Delay Disease.” Contest judge Kristiana Kahakauwila had this to say about the piece: “When fiction weaves in surprising facts— in this case, about the genetic mutation that leads to flat finger pads and an absence of fingerprints— I’m always eager to see how those facts will enhance the story without overtaking the narrative or its characters. ‘Immigrant Delay Disease’ finds resonance in that which goes unseen: a finger’s mark, a mother’s body, an immigrant’s presence, a budding life in the womb. In precise and lyric language, the author draws out the complex emotions of these unseen presences, in one moment exhibiting wry humor and in another bawdy desire and in still another deep longing. As if all that wasn’t enough, the ending spools out in a completely unexpected way that jolted me into a new understanding of what it means to belong— to one’s own body, to another person, to a family, and to a nation.”
Keya Mitra is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University and received the 2018 President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program and a Fulbright creative-writing research grant to India. Her fiction received notable mention in Best American Short Stories 2018, was a finalist for the 2021 Indiana Review Prize, and has appeared in The Kenyon Review (2011 and 2015), The Bellevue Literary Review, The Southwest Review, Best New American Voices, The Bennington Review, and many other publications. Her essays appear in Witness Magazine (2021), and were runner-up for the 2021 Witness Magazine Literary Awards and finalists for the 2021 Iowa Review and Disquiet Literary Prizes. Keya has written two novels, a short-story collection, and book-length memoir.
Finalists
The entries for this year’s literary awards were outstanding, and we wish to congratulate the finalists in each category:
49th Parallel Award for Poetry
“Origin of Terror” by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
“when they see us, still they do not see” by Monique Ferrell
“When They Took My Father’s Body” by Janine Certo
“The Great Conjunction” by Randolph Thomas
“The Sea and the Residency Permit” by Eva Heisler
“Postpartum” by Samuel Piccone
“Crabbing” by Jessica Rapisarda
“To the Coyote on the Side of the Golden State Freeway” by L.A. Johnson
“Endnotes” by Lynne Ellis
“Green Sorrow” by Roman Johnson
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
“On Being Yellow” by Caroline Aung
“Until the Weave of Us is Gone” by Jenny Apostol
“The Boogeyman” by Erin Crosby-Eckstine
“The Way I Bleed” by Sharon Esterly
“Self Defense” by Joni Whitworth
“Hurricane Watch” by Eileen Waggoner
“Lovely Light” by Emily Pulfer-Terino
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
“Dovecote” by Michael Edman
“Late Reunion” by Randolph Thomas
“Candied Almonds on My Way to Rome” by Mariano Zaro
“Rescue” by Kipling Knox
“Elbistan” by Hardy Griffin
Thank you, again, to all the entrants for giving us the opportunity to read your work. The contest submissions were especially strong this year, and we so enjoyed reading them.
We welcome your work when our general submissions reading period re-opens on September 15, 2021.
Next year’s contests will open for submissions on December 1, 2021.
Bellingham Review accepts all submissions via Submittable.
Featured Image by Erwan Hesry at Unsplash