2009 Wabash Prize for Fiction

Final Judge: Tobias Wolff

 

First Prize: $1000 and winning entry published in Summer/Fall 2009 issue
Entries of honorable mention also published in Summer/Fall 2009 issue

Complete Guidelines for Contest Submissions

Deadline: Entries must be received by March 19, 2009. This is NOT a postmark deadline. Entries received after March 19, 2009 will be returned unread.

1. Submit one piece of fiction (or a series of related short-shorts) totaling no more than 10,000 words.   

2. A $10 reading fee payable to Sycamore Review must accompany each entry. Do not send cash. When sending more than one entry, additional reading fees must also be included ($10 per additional story).

3. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable only if Sycamore Review is notified immediately upon acceptance elsewhere.

4. All entries must be typed and must include a cover letter with author's name and contact information (address, telephone, and email address) as well as the titles and word counts of all entries submitted. The author’s name or any identifying information should not appear on the manuscript itself.

5.  Stories should be unpublished.  We do not accept previously published work.

6. Manuscript pages should be numbered and should include the title of the piece. 

7. Please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard if you wish to be notified upon receipt of your manuscript.

8. Manuscripts will not be returned. Winners will be announced by May 1, 2009. For information on winners and runners-up, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope with entry.

9. All contest submissions will be considered for regular inclusion in the Sycamore Review.

10. Questions may be directed to Mehdi Okasi, Editor-in-Chief, at sycamore@purdue.edu.

Send 2009 Wabash Prize for Fiction submissions and reading fee to:

2009 Wabash Prize for Fiction 
Sycamore Review
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
Purdue University
West Lafayette , IN 47907

 

 

Winner of 2008 Wabash Prize for Poetry

Jim Tilley

for his poem "On the Art of Patience" 

Final Judge Billy Collins wrote of Jim Tilley's poem: 

The speaker of this poem may be stalled in a store waiting for help, but his restless consciousness continues
to move through a series of quirky associations, which run freely while being lightly enclosed in formal stanzas. The result is a syntactically breathless interior monologue which finally runs out of patience itself and collapses in comic deflation.

 

You can read this poem and the runners-up in the Winter/Spring issue 21.1 due out in a few weeks.  Order your copy today by writing to us and enclosing a check/money order made payable to Sycamore Review.  

 

 

Winner of 2008 Wabash Prize for Fiction

 

Matthew Simmons

 

for his story "Saxophone Lung Explodes"

His winning story and several runners-up appear in the Summer/Fall 2008 issue of Sycamore Review.  You may read an excerpt of Matthew's origional story on our website (linked from the Current Issue page).

 

 

Winner of 2007 Wabash Prize for Poetry

Jude Nutter

for her poem "Goats"

Her winning poem and several runners-up will be published soon in the Winter/Spring 2008 issue of the Sycamore Review.  Of Jude Nutter's winning poem, this year's contest judge Eavan Boland wrote the following:

This poem sites human memory in the desolation and indifference of what man does to nature. The speaker remembers seeing goats slaughtered at a gypsy fair in Cyprus when he was a child. His father and he were there together, and the poem weighs memory against reality, his father's recollection against his own. It is a beautifully drawn, restrained narrative of mutual misunderstanding. The poem's craft never fails, even with the disclosing and intimate subject of family relations. The language is rigorous, yet exuberant with color and image. The tone is measured and the cadences move perfectly through different swerves of description and rhetoric. The lineation never jars. This poem achieves something striking: in poetry, it is very difficult to move private experience out of private language. But it is done here. The result is that the poem has authority, both as music, voice and memory. And that's rare.

 

Winner of the 2007 Wabash Prize for Fiction:

Jacob M. Appel

for his story "Exposure" 

The Wabash Prize for Fiction was judged by Dan Chaon.  Jacob M. Appel's story is now available in issue 19.2, and an excerpt will be posted here soon on the Current Issue page.

Rebekah Silverman, then Editor-in-Chief, wrote in her editor's note: 

The winning story, “Exposure,” by Jacob M. Appel, details a flasher’s encounter with a grade school teacher, and can be found on page 12.  Mr. Chaon writes of the story, “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.”  Congratulations to Mr. Appel, and thanks to all those who submitted their work.

 

Winner of the 2006 Wabash Prize for Poetry:

Cindy May Murphy

for her poem "For My Father, Who Fears I'm Going to Hell" 

The Wabash Prize for Poetry was judged by poet Ellen Bryant Voigt.  Cindy May Murphy's poem, as well as other poems chosen as finalists for the prize, are available in issue 19.1.  You can read selections from that issue, including the prize winning poem, here.