Announcing the Winners of the Bellingham Review’s 2020 Literary Contests
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Bellingham Review 2020 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 Philip Metres, Sue William Silverman, and Aimee Parkison, respectively. The winners will each receive an award of $1,000 and will be published in the Spring 2021 print issue of Bellingham Review.
49th Parallel Award for Poetry
Esther Ra is the winner of the 2020 49th Parallel Award for Poetry for her poem “A Bouquet of Bandaged Mouths.” Contest judge Philip Metres says of the piece, “’A Bouquet of Bandaged Mouths’ is an ambitious yet deftly-rendered crown of sonnets (or mostly sonnets) that explores the impact of COVID-19 (corona for corona!) on South Korea, from the viewpoint of a South Korean. I am taken with the way the poet captures both the breadth and breaths of this pandemic, alternatingly telescopic and microscopic.”
Esther Ra is a Pushcart prize-winning poet and novelist who alternates between the US and South Korea. She is the author of book of untranslatable things (Grayson Books, 2018) and co-author of Tadpole Pond (One Odd Bird Press, forthcoming). Her work has also been published in Rattle, The Rumpus, The Korea Times, and Border Crossing, among others, and has been the recipient of the Women Writing War Poetry Award as well as the RAR William Wantling Award for Poetry.
Esther works to support healthcare for North Korean refugees, and oversees The Underwater Railroad, a literary reunification project. She illustrates portraits in her spare time. In life, as in writing, Esther is deeply interested in the quiet beauty of the ordinary. (Instagram: @esther.haelan.ra)
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
Traci Brimhall is the winner of the 2020 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Possession” Contest judge Sue William Silverman writes, “This essay grabs the reader from the very first sentence (‘Before the employee at the Museum of Shadows lets me touch the haunted doll, she makes me put on a pair of black gloves’). That is a terrific ‘hook’ for a reader, and the rest of the piece lives up to that promise. The essay is a meditation upon the inevitability of change (‘Better to leave these figures in stages of transformation, a perpetual becoming’); empathy (‘We consider different ways to repair and restore an object, to connect with it the way we so often do with people or wide-eyed mammals’); and reciprocation (‘My mother gave me a porcelain doll for Christmas one year, and the delight on her face told me I should love it, too’). This is a lovely, evocative, compelling, layered piece of writing. It is an essay that delights on a first read, and continues to unfold when revisited.”
Traci Brimhall is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon 2020). Her poems have appeared recently appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Believer, and Best American Poetry. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Normal School, Brevity, and cited as notable several times in Best American Essays. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Kings/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
Danny Thiemann Venegas is the winner of the 2020 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for his story “Echolocation for Mixed Race Runaways.” Contest judge Aimee Parkison writes, “Among the finest stories I’ve read in years—a moving narrative with unforgettable characters revealed through fresh, lively, authentic prose.”
Danny Thiemann Venegas is an associate attorney at Earthjustice where he assists litigation against Trump’s border wall and is part of the international climate and energy team, fighting fossil fuel infrastructure in Latin America, Indonesia, Australia, and elsewhere. Prior to coming to Earthjustice, he was an attorney in the Migrant Farmworker program at Oregon Law Center where he was part of a team that fought for, and won, key protections for the workers that put food on everyone’s tables.
Danny says, “Writing is still a weapon. I’ve seen it happen in my work and in amazing magazines like Bellingham Review.” His writing has appeared in The Millions, New Delta Review, Your Impossible Voice, and in other publications. He is winner of the Table4 Foundation competition for new writers.
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
“News That Goes Unnoticed Admidst This American Catastrophe” by Gwendolyn Ann Hill Mauroner
“After the storm, fruit dries on the ground” by Catheine Ferguson
“Big Basin National Park, 2009” by Kendall Morris
“To Touch the Light” by Meli Broderick Eaton
“Autocomplete” by Adam Scheffler
“Fever” by John Sibley Williams
“How to Build a Dreamcatcher” by Vernita Hall
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
“Retained Products of Conception” by Ingrid Jendrzejewski
“L Is Actually for Love: An Abecedarian of Dementia” by JoAnne Lehman
“Extra Innings” by Colton Green
“Where the Night Stars Are Orchids” by E.A. Farro
“But what was she wearing?” by Kelly Hill
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
“In Our House” by Susan Hettinger
“The Enduring Burn” by Oscar Cuevas
“We All Live Here Forever” by Marguerite Alley
“Khoshbakhtam” by Kent Kosack
All of the 2020 contest entrants receive a subscription to Bellingham Review’s Spring 2020 print edition, Issue 80.
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, 2020.
Next year’s contests will open for submissions on December 1, 2020.
Bellingham Review accepts all submission via Submittable.
Featured Image: “Light Painting” by Wendelin Jacober