Announcing the Winners of the Bellingham Review’s 2019 Literary Contests
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Bellingham Review 2019 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 Nickole Brown, Ira Sukrungruang, and Robin Hemley, respectively. The winners will each receive an award of $1,000 and will be published in the Spring 2020 print issue of Bellingham Review.
49th Parallel Award for Poetry
Gail Newman is the winner of the 2019 49th Parallel Award for Poetry for her poem “Mishpacha.” Contest judge Nickole Brown says of the piece, “It’s a delightful poem, full of the contrasts necessary to so many big, rambling families. I was particularly taken by the recognition of a kind of parenting with which I’m deeply familiar, one in which children are regularly fussed at and threatened but never harmed. . . . ‘This was America,’ the author writes, adding, ‘but what did we know, / green as we were, new shoots, rising / from Old Country mud.’ I didn’t yet know the Yiddish word ‘Mishpacha,’ but it means ‘family.’ I won’t likely forget it, nor will I forget this tender and imaginative poem that speaks so clearly of this immigrant experience.”
Gail Newman, a child of Polish Holocaust survivors, was born after WWII in a Displaced Persons’ Camp in Lansberg, Germany. Her family immigrated to the United States and settled in Los Angeles.
Gail’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Calyx, California Women Poets, Canary, Ghosts of the Holocaust, Nimrod International Journal (forthcoming), Prairie Schooner, Prism, Spillway, The Doll Collection, and America, We Call Your Name. A collection of poetry, One World, was published by Moon Tide Press.
Gail was the co-founder and editor of Room, A Women’s Literary Journal. She has also edited two children’s poetry collections: C is for California and Dear Earth. Gail lives in San Francisco with her husband.
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
Toni Judnitch is the winner of the 2019 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Don’t You See?” Contest judge Ira Sukrungruang writes, “The language, the composition, the deep interrogation of a father’s madness—all of this creates a disjointed life, set in rural Minnesota; a life layered in the known and unknown; a childhood unfolding in fragments—like a memories, like a fractured mind. At the center of this, a narrator pulling loose threads of understanding. Amid a crumbling world, there still exists the stars above, even if below is a pit containing the detritus of the loss and discarded.”
Toni Judnitch’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, Sycamore Review, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, Yemassee, and Third Coast. She received New South’s 2018 Prose Prize, and a story of hers was selected for reprinting in New Stories from the Midwest. She is a PhD candidate at University of Cincinnati, where she is at work on her first novel.
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
Corey Flintoff is the winner of the 2019 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for his story “The Marchioness.” Contest judge Robin Hemley writes, “This story was compelling from start to finish and felt wholly original. Not only was the premise smart, a man trying to protect his young daughter from the inappropriate family histories as told by his dying mother, but he’s trying to whitewash his own connection to this difficult legacy, and his own failings. The character of the mother is particularly memorable, and the story as a whole is vibrant and vivid and will stay with me for a long while, I imagine.”
Corey Flintoff is a former reporter and foreign correspondent, whose assignments included the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, the revolutions in Egypt and Libya, and the earthquake in Haiti. He was NPR’s Southeast Asia correspondent and the NPR bureau chief in Moscow.
His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction online, The Florida Review and other publications. He won Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest in Fall 2017 and is honored to receive the Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction.
Flintoff was born in Fairbanks and spent many years in Alaska, the setting for some of his fiction. He lives in Maryland with his wife, the painter Diana Derby.
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
“and the neighbor’s dog ate my underpants.” and “School Girl Crush” by Melissa Lux
“Mother of Laughter” and “Ganesha Enters the Body Laughing” by Zachary Asher
“Inheritance” by Emily Tuszynska
“DNA” by Angela Dribben
“The Cycle” and “Self/Division” by Lani Yu
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
“Bent: Daughterhood as Told Through Skin and Bone” by Jeannine Ouellette and Lillian Ouellette-Howitz
“Ghosts in Pyeongchang” by Mee-ok
“Circles” by Bill Marsh
“Inside Lane” by L.J. Sysko
“The Marvelous Migration of Shia Bloch” by Will McGrath
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
“In Each and Every Generation” by Emmet Hirsch
“Do Svidaniya” by Mary Winsor
“Remove Thy Neighbor” by William Hauser
“I Wish I Had Your Ghost” by Erin Belair
All of the 2019 contest entrants receive a subscription to Bellingham Review’s Spring 2019 print edition, Issue 78.
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 enjoyed reading them very much.
We welcome your work when our general submissions reading period re-opens on September 15, 2019.
Next year’s contests will open for submissions on December 1, 2019.
Bellingham Review accepts all submission via Submittable.
Featured Image: “Bright” by Ruth Hartnup