Over here at Sycamore, we're thrilled to announce the winner of the 2007 Wabash Prize for Fiction: Jacob M. Appel, for his story "Exposure." Dan Chaon, who judged this year's fiction contest, wrote, "I appreciated the way the humor and mood became more subtle and complicated as the story went on, and I was impressed with the way the author maneuvered through several difficult-to-handle but nicely modulated plot turns." Mr. Appel's "Exposure" details an encounter between a middle-aged flasher and his grade-school teacher.

Thanks so much to everyone who participated. Overall, the quality of the submissions was really high, and the entries were great fun to read; I know Mr. Chaon's decision was a hard one.

By the way - sorry for the delay, the announcement should have gone up yesterday. Thanks for being patient!

Don't forget about the 2007 Wabash Prize for Fiction, deadline March 15th!

But seriously.  Deadline March 15th.  Here for details!

A reminder: the 2007 Wabash Prize for Fiction - judged this year by Dan Chaon, author of Among the Missing, a National Book Award Finalist, -  is up and running.  The deadline is March 15.  See complete guidelines here.

I'm thrilled to announce the winner of the 2006 Wabash Prize for Poetry!  "For  My Father, Who Fears I'm Going to Hell," by Cindy May Murphy, was chosen by 2006 poetry judge Ellen Bryant Voigt as the first place winner.  Ms. Murphy's poem will be featured in our upcoming issue 19.1, due out in mid-January.  Cindy May Murphy  is an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Night Train, Bryant Literary Review, New Delta Review, and a number of other journals. 

I'd also like to congratulate the authors of the four poems chosen as finalists for this year's Wabash Prize (whose poems will also be featured in issue 19.1): Susan Settlemyre Williams, for her poem "Linnaeus in Eden," Jennifer Perrine for her poem "Majie," Harry Waitzman for his poem "Homage to Marina Tsvetayeva," and Allison Seay for her poem "Spoken For.

I was talking yesterday to a friend about the way that first book contests have changed the way we see new poets' work.  Without getting too deeply into the issue, here's the argument: when books are judged on their own - not against other books - the question a would-be publisher thinks is "Is this book good enough to be published?"  When a poet enters a book contest her book is judged against all the other books submitted to the contest.  The question becomes "Is this book better than all these other books?" 

Unfortunately, often "better" means "more stylistically even, more adult, more sophisticated": three things that I don't think that even very good young poets necessarily are.  The short-term effect: emerging poets are forced to mature their style and stop experimenting early on, so that their first book can be deemed publishable.   The long-term effect: a crop of poets whose styles have calcified early on and who might unconsciously see experimentation as a bad thing. 

 Which is not to say that all book contests are a bad thing, or even that all contests are a bad thing (they're not!).  For example, The New York Times has an article today about the results of a book contest to choose the writer of a sequel to J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan.  The winner, Geraldine McCaughrean, won the right to write Peter Pan in Scarlet.  I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this, frankly.

And the winner is...Jeff P. Jones for his story "The Source of My Troubles."

Prize judge Janet Burroway said of this story, "...a true original, and comes at serious feelings from a wonky angle. The language in both dialogue and narrative is as fresh as the setting is rotten." We too were struck by the vividness of the setting and the playfullness of the language. Thank you for an excellent story, Jeff. We'll be publishing "Source" in the upcoming issue.

In addition to being published in what could possibly be the best issue of a lit mag ever (no snark), Jeff will receive $1000 cash prize. Now don't you wish you had entered? Don't fret, the 2006 Wabash Prize for Poetry will get into gear soon, and there's always the 2007 Fiction Prize to prepare for. Watch this space for details.

Many thanks to the amazing Janet Burroway for agreeing to judge our contest. We hope that all our future judges will be as gracious and as generous as you have been.