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NATIONAL FICTION WINNER
"Airman" by Matt Mendez
Finalists: Robert Schirmer, Justin St. Germain, Maija Stromberg,
Brad Crutchfield, Richard Weems
NATIONAL CREATIVE NONFICTION WINNER
"River Voices" by Catherine Dryden
Finalists: Lisbeth Davidow, Deborah Thompson, Joshua Leavitt
NATIONAL POETRY WINNER
"Without" by Elizaebeth Volpe
Finalists: Michaela Carter, Melody Gee, Lauen Eggert-Crowe,
William Derge, Jayne Brown, Zach Vesper, Patty Crane
NATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY WINNER selected by Susan Moldenhauer
"Timna Valley, Israel 2006" by Jim Haberman
Finalists: Jennifer Warren, P. Walter, Larry Jones,
Ben Boblett, Austen Lorenz, BK Skaggs
A note from the judge:
From its earliest inception, photography has been a medium that has transformed image-making and creative processes. Advancing technologies have challenged our perceptions of what is real and courts our desire to alter reality. Digital printers have taken the mystery of an image appearing in a tray of chemistry in the low amber light of a darkroom into the light of day. It is easy to be seduced by the technology.
The photographs submitted to the Alligator Juniper competition varied in approach, media, and subject. Most were straight, unmanipulated prints; others were constructed images and digital manipulations. Landscape was a dominant theme but portraiture, documentation, still life, and abstraction were also submitted. There were a number of images made in foreign countries.
Considering the essential elements of photography—time and place—combined with a skillfully executed print became the tenets on which I considered these photographs. I was moved by the power of the images selected in conveying the human condition, extraordinary landscapes, delightful compositions, and mystery of a moment in time.
Thanks to all the talented writers and photographers who entered our contests this year! Please see our 2009 Contest Guidelines to submit this year.
Thanks to everyone who entered Alligator Juniper's 6-Word Story Contest at the AWP Conference. We received many wonderful entries and are proud to announce the following winners whose mini stories will be published in AJ 2008, forthcoming later this spring.
First Place
Her birthmark disappeared, so I left.
-Aaron Burch
Second Place
They mistook the mayonnaise for friendship.
-Alex Geng
Third Place
Broke eyeglasses. Thought steam was wife.
-Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi
Finalists:
Drool. Develop. Detour. Decline. Drool. - Erin Murphy (Dig it: only 5 words!)
My name in lights. Or love. - Amanda Nazario
Free stuff: One glove, circular saw. - Mark Polanzak
Strange country, this ragged roiling rage. - M. Bartley Seigel
Other authors we'll be publishing in 2008 include National Writing Contest Winners Matt Mendez, Elizabeth Volpe, and Catherine Dryden; a special genre blur section with an introduction by Margot Singer; and judge's notes from Benjamin Percy, Miles Waggener, and Danielle Trussoni.
STUDENT FICTION WINNERS
1st Place: “The Border” by Jessica Roth
2nd Place: “Captain’s Alley” by Joe Hoover
3rd Place: “Customary” by Libby Rasmussen
Honorable Mentions: “Bella” by Lydia Paar & “Walter” by Floramae Teskey
From Fiction Judge Ben Percy: Judging this contest made me feel very hopeful. Here, in this tall stack of undergraduate stories, was the next generation of fiction. And from this sampling of their work, I can say the future looks very bright indeed. Their hearts are big, their talent enormous. They carry in their fingertips a kind of magic, as they dragged me from my desk and into another world, where ink and paper became flesh and blood, where I lived lives that didn’t belong to me, feeling love and hate, joy and misery, and everything in between.
My initial plan was to read the stories through once, thinking the winners would announce themselves plainly. This was not at all the case, and after pawing through the stories twice, and then twice more, I had narrowed the list of contestants, but not by much. This is to say that the competition was muscular and I ended up setting many fine stories regretfully aside.
But I kept coming back to “The Border.” In it, we follow a nameless Mexican woman who somehow remains at once familiar and mysterious, like the neighbor you often watch through the blinds, thinking you know their habits until they surprise you one day with a flashy new car, a loud party. Here was someone that made me lean forward, that I wanted to know better. The calm assurance of the narration especially impressed me. I trusted this voice and engaged with it as the voice of a place, where “people the color of the Chihuahuan desert” trade “battered pesos” and boys carry drums “made of animal hide, the fur still intact, taken from the mountainous homelands to the south.” Such language—so distinctive—so clean and musical—every word clicking and whispering against the next like a stone drawn riverward by a powerful current—made me shake my head with wonder. And I admired very much how the author incorporated the political without being political, refraining from editorial remark, allowing the story to instead find its way through character.
I know you’ll enjoy it, as I did, as one of the first of many moving stories this author will write.
Benjamin Percy is the author of two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007) and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction appears in Esquire, Men's Journal, The Paris Review, Best American Short Stories, The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and many other places. His prizes include the Pushcart Prize and the Plimpton Prize. He teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin -- Stevens Point.
STUDENT POETRY WINNERS
1st Place: "Are We Done Yet?" by John Ziegler
2nd Place: "bedouin star" by Loryn Isaacs
3rd Place: "the many, true names of the earth" by Jessica Roth
Honorable Mentions: "Two Old Carpenters Covered in Drywall Dust Trying to Build Something to Die in" by Joe Hoover & "Poem Written on the Back of the Map of New Foundland" by Katie Murphy
From Poetry Judge Miles Waggener: While reading the entries for Alligator Juniper's student poetry contest, I thought of Seneca's famous chiasmus: "God gave me alone to all the world, and all the world to me alone." While very different in scope, subject and voice, the poems seemed to assert that it was up to the poets to discover or re-discover the names for our world, and the poem was the occasion to come to terms with the crisis at hand. Over all, the work explored concerns that tend to draw people to poetry: the beloved, the road, finding and making a home in an uncertain world, and how these experiences tempered, tested, and provided an occasion to articulate an identity or voice. With few exceptions, each poem was, as Stevens says, "a cry of its occasion," and the work submitted was strong.
It was a pleasure to discover poems from Prescott College's remarkable community of writers. These poets brought to the page a richness that comes from living and learning vividly in the world--especially in the nomenclature found in following their curiosities and passions.
Interestingly enough, two of the three prize-winning poems approach naming the world from radically different perspectives. In "The many, true names of the earth" the poet luxuriates in both the indigenous and colonial names of the world. However, in the poem "bedouin star," the tongue is "a calcified cobweb" where the "trees brush away his name," and any solace found in the names of the world is barred.
The prismatic "Are We Done Yet?" the contest's first place poem, stages a sequence of anaphoric declarations, parallel phrases that glance from different angles, different scales, one central crisis. Every age, perhaps, has felt belated, on the brink of something irrevocable, even cataclysmic. By turns, each of the six sentences in this poem serves up a new drama, creating a network of dramas. At times the poem's speaker addresses a relational conflict, addressing a "you" in the midst of leave-taking. Soon, the poem grotesques into sword swallowers, the yellow tape of barricades-- even (hooray!) an animal sacrifice. By the time the poem closes with its well-traveled historical allusion, I am ready for Rome to burn; the poem moves from the intimate to the collective. Paradoxically, this poem's strangeness and dread feel alarmingly real and urgent.
Congratulations to these poets, and to everyone who submitted poems. It was a difficult decision to narrow the results down to five.
Born and raised in Arizona, Miles Waggener is the author of Phoenix Suites, winner of the Washington Prize. His poems, poetry translations, and essays have appeared in the Indiana Review, Seneca Review, Crazyhorse, the Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, the Mid-American Review, Salt Hill, and others. He won an individual creative writing fellowship from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and a prize from the Academy of American Poets. Before joining the faculty of the Writer’s Workshop at The University of Nebraska at Omaha, he taught writing and Latin American literature at Prescott College. He lives in Omaha with his wife and fellow poet, Megan Gannon.
STUDENT CREATIVE NONFICTION WINNERS
1st Place: “Elegant Universe” by Lydia Paar
2nd Place: “Lake Superior to James Bay by Canoe” by Chase Edwards
3rd Place: “Hell's Hole” by Floramae Teskey
Honorable Mentions: "Running Dogs" by Michael Riley & “Night Watch” by Jessica Roth
From Creative Nonfiction Judge Danielle Trussoni: If the submissions to this year’s Suzanne Tito Student Prize are any indication, the natural world is great inspiration for writers of Creative Nonfiction. An overwhelming number of essays drew on encounters with nature—both its beauty and danger.
Nature writing has always been a mainstay of American nonfiction writing, and so I was thrilled to find such evocative, fresh pieces among the submissions. Take these lines from the second place winner, “Lake Superior to James Bay by Canoe,” that are so vivid one can almost hear the rush of water: “Thunderhouse Falls: the egos of voyageurs thrived in places like this. Prefaced with a string of unforgiving rapids, the Missinaibi River splits from the Precambrian shield and rushed toward the Hudson Bay lowlands with a sixty-foot drop of three stacked, foaming waterfalls.” There are similar moments in the third place entry and both honorable mentions, all of which are set in the wild.
The winner of this year’s contest, “Elegant Universe,” is an essay about a different kind of adventure: Coming of age in Portland, Oregon. The tone of this piece drew me in from the very beginning—it is raw while remaining descriptive. The author’s decision to write the piece in the third person—a risky and unusual choice for a piece of nonfiction—was a gamble that paid off. Descriptions of the city are deadpan, almost nonchalant. The characters are described with equal reserve. Take the main character, LP: “Like everyone else her age, LP works in food service. No, she works at Blockbuster. No, it’s an allergy clinic.” While many personal essays describe ad infinitum the inner life of the narrator, this piece had a reticence and intelligence that left me wanting to read more.
Danielle Trussoni was born in Wisconsin and now splits her time between the United States and Bulgaria. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Telegraph Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Her first book, Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir, was awarded the 2006 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award and was chosen as one of The New York Times top 10 books for 2006.
E-mail: aj@prescott.edu
Mail: Alligator Juniper, 220 Grove Ave. Prescott,
AZ 86301
Phone: (928) 350-2012
Fax: (928) 776-5102
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