Announcing the Winners of the Bellingham Review’s 2018 Literary Contests
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Bellingham Review 2018 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 Oliver de la Paz, Jenny Boully, and Debra Dean, respectively. The winners will each receive an award of $1,000 and will be published in the Spring 2018 print issue of Bellingham Review.
49th Parallel Award for Poetry
Greg Rappleye is the winner of the 2018 49th Parallel Award for Poetry for his poem “To Tell the Hornets.” Contest judge Oliver de la Paz says of the piece, “What is remarkable is how the poet turns an image—the hornet’s nest—filled with a history of furious symbolism into a new symbol for grief as the swarm, in blind grief over their own losses, suggest a possibility for the speaker’s articulation of pain.”
Greg Rappleye‘s poems have previously appeared in Bellingham Review, and have also appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other literary journals. His second book of poems, A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His third book, Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007) was first runner-up for the Dorset Prize and was published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series. He teaches in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
Courtney Kersten is the winner of the 2018 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Women of the Sky.” Contest judge Jenny Boully writes, “The essayist captures perfectly the language of solitude, of loneliness, the epiphanies that one can have only as a result of such private and isolated communication with the world.”
Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde: A Memoir (University of Wisconsin Press 2018). Her essays can be seen or are forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Brevity, The Normal School, River Teeth, Hotel Amerika, DIAGRAM, The Sonora Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She was a Fulbright Fellow to Riga, Latvia, and is currently a PhD student in Literature, Creative Writing, and Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
Ed Allen is the winner of the 2018 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction for his story “Anorak.” Contest judge Debra Dean writes, “I love the risk this author takes to unveil a quiet life. ‘Anorak’ follows the interior musings of a solitary man in an airport, revisiting his responses to two fleeting and seemingly insignificant interactions with strangers […] With the accretion of minutiae, the story grows in power, making us care about someone who in real life we would almost certainly overlook.”
Ed Allen has published two novels: Straight Through the Night, and Mustang Sally. That latter novel was made into the 2003 movie Easy Six (retitled in the Showtime DVD release as Easy Sex). His story “River of Toys” was included in Best American Short Stories 1990. His story collection Ate It Anyway won the 2002 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His sonnet sequence 67 Mixed Messages was published in 2006. Ed’s fiction and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, GQ, Story, Prairie Schooner, The Indiana Review, and River Styx. His latest project is South to New Jersey: A Novel in Limericks. He is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of South Dakota, and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
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
“Solstice” by Katharine Ogle
“Exonym” and “We Are Buried Swans” by Kelly Morse
“Dear Lee” and “Poem For My Mentor” by Lynne Ellis
“Waterbirth” by Kyle Fleming-Rosko
“Shattered into Earth” by Seanse Lynch Ducken
“Home On Your Back” by Martha Brenckle
Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
“Standing Ovation” by Adrienne Bernhard
“Yelps from the Brink” by Juliana Staveley-O’Carroll
“Common Motivations for Teaching English, or Short Physics Lessons” by Kelly Morse
“Navigating in the Dark” by Renata Golden
“Hydrophobophobia” by Julie Seltzer
“Hole Series” by Brigitte Lewis
“Singular Bird: A Discovery Log” by Gail Griffin
“Sights of the Afterlife” by Charlie Wakenshaw
Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction
“Soup du Jour” by Catherine Le Nguyen
“Funerals for Introverts” by Aurelie Sheehan
“The Russian Installment Plan” by DM Armstrong
“Black Stream Water” by Sophia Terazawa
“The First Girl Captain” by PJ Lane
All of the 2018 contest entrants will receive a subscription to Bellingham Review’s Spring 2018 print edition, Issue 76, which will include the 2017 contest winners.
Thank you, again, to all the entrants for giving us the opportunity to read your work. We had a record number of submissions this year, and we enjoyed reading them very much.
We welcome your work when our general submissions reading period re-opens on September 15, 2017.
Next year’s contests will open for submissions on December 1, 2018.
Bellingham Review accepts all submission via Submittable.
Featured Image: “Untitled” by Jason