We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2019 Wabash Prizes in Poetry and Fiction, as selected by our judges. The winning pieces and runners up will appear in our forthcoming issue, 31.2, which will be available in the spring.

Wabash Prize in Poetry, selected by Jos Charles:

Winner: “Prayer to the charcoal dusk” by Felicia Zamora
“Prayer to the charcoal dusk” sketches more than the movement of a moon, more than a you. Before the supposed logic of law there is—I felt lead to, through the poem—the passage, a kind of lyric imagination, violent, which carves up passages, the law invented after only to justify it. And how something might, like the moon, triangulate. How two people—separated by such cruel, imagined distances—might co-occur with respect to this other thing, looking up to the moon. How surveillance originates before any glance. How a brain, carved too, is set aflame.

Runner-up: “From Et in Arcadia ego & am Girlish” by Bradley Trumpfheller
“From Et in Arcadia ego & am Girlish” moves from a dead language to would have had across a stanza break. Yes, it has sonic lovelinesses: yarrow, unfucking, licking glass from a floor. But it has the starkest agility—this capacity to move from the impossible or what is foreclosed to what is possible, from a boy to a day, from across to crossdresser. This poem knows its capacities even as it names its incapacities. It begs and thirsts and sobs. It addresses, shows u the you u might, had you been, have been.

Wabash Prize in Fiction, as selected by JY Yang:

Winner: “Letter in A Mokuk” by Mary Elizabeth Aubé
A heartfelt tale told in epistolary format. In the twilight of her life, Lisette, an Anishanaabe woman, writes a letter to her white French father who left the family when she was a little girl. The complex politics and generational devastation of settler colonialism are distilled into a quiet, deeply personal story.

Runner-up: “A Place They’d Never Been” by Joe Garrett
“A Place They’d Never Been” follows the story of Sarah, whose life is upended when a figure from her childhood shows up in her settled life. The lush prose and attention to mundane detail belie a core of darkness as Sarah struggles to escape the trauma and violence in her past.

We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2018 Wabash Prizes in Poetry and Fiction, as selected by our judges. The winning pieces and runners up will appear in our forthcoming issue, 30.2, which will be available in the spring.

Wabash Prize in Poetry, selected by Hanif Abdurraqib:

Winner: “My American Ghost” by John Sibley Williams
The poem has such surprising movements and carefully crafted breakings of the line. The reading experience was haunting, and ultimately extremely fulfilling. The imagery in the poem, specifically, rings several clear and echoing bells. The pace of the poem is inviting, allowing it to give way to surprise. The best work is work that allows you to leave it with no answers, but more questions, and more opportunities to return to your own work renewed. This poem did that for me.

Runner-up: “I’d Like To Say A Few Things To The World” by Shannon Castleton
I value its playfulness and whimsy, as much as I value its knowledge of weight and sadness. It all blends into a kind of soft and closely-held introspection that a reader can feel lucky to be witness to. The conversational narrative doesn’t shut a reader out the way those narratives sometimes can. Even though it makes its mission statement clear, there is still a door open for a reader to enter the poem, and find something that speaks to themselves, their anxieties, their quests for joy.

Wabash Prize in Fiction, as selected by Rachel Khong:

Winner: “Please Report Your Bug Here” by Joshua Riedel
Bizarre, imaginative, original, and immensely readable, this story somehow manages to comment on so much at once: work, tech, art, one’s twenties, romantic relationships, and what the hell we’re all doing here. The writing was admirably uncomplicated and unostentatious; the narrator’s voice was conversational, yet assured — confidently transporting us around in time, the way the best fiction does. Reading this story, I felt in solid, competent hands. By the story’s end — and this ending, by the way, is pitch perfect, affecting, understated, and melancholy all at once — I’m left wondering if I want to be in this world, or the other one. I’m looking forward to reading more from this author!

Runner-up: “Sixness” by Danielle Zaccagnino
This beautifully striking story is deft and stylish and poetic. It’s transporting, too: taking you not only into another perspective, but another world — possibly even another universe, where french bread can blind you and a kitchen can be “champagne-flooded.” Familiar things are rendered new; I loved things like the strange surprise of bricks being “joyless,” though of course they can be. This story stands out to me for its strange, dreamlike form, that somehow perfectly captures the hopeless tangle of love and baggage that anybody with a family can understand.

Winners Selected for Wabash Prizes in Fiction and Poetry