We are thrilled to announce this year’s FAIRY TALE REVIEW AWARDS IN POETRY AND PROSE. As always, we were stunned by the high quality of the submissions we received, and so grateful to our esteemed final judges. We can’t wait for you to read the winning work in The Pink Issue, forthcoming in 2019.
Fairy Tale Review Award in Prose
Selected by Kathryn Davis
“The Sleeping Girl” by Skye Anicca
Skye Anicca is the recipient of grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center and the winner of a Dana Award in short fiction. Her writing has appeared in Santa Monica Review and Passages North, among others. She working on a collection that incorporates fairy tales, ghosts, and grunge era pop culture to evoke once upon a times when phone booths were portals, and a magical coin turned a cord into a connection.
Of “The Sleeping Girl,” Kathryn Davis writes:
Most stories you walk into; you think you’re walking into this story but this story walks into you. This story has been happening for a very long time, the engine driving it operating for hours or weeks, maybe even years—the “length of a horizon.” Like in one of Isak Dinesen’s marvelous tales: you think you know where you’re going and then the story propels you out the other side of it and you actually think you’ve landed in the familiar world, dumbstruck. The marvel of this story is the perversity of its vision. Where does the familiar world lie, the world where to sleep is to be tucked in safe? How does the world lie to us? What do we have to have stolen from us, what do we have to steal, to earn that tucked-in sleep? In “The Sleeping Girl” time is the element from which morality beckons. You’d better read this story more than once. You’d better read it at least three times. Even so, you’re never getting out of it.
Fairy Tale Review Award in Poetry
Selected by Jane Miller
“At Publix, the Florida Skunk Ape Hunts Dangerous Game” by Caylin Capra-Thomas
Caylin Capra-Thomas’s second chapbook, Inside My Electric City, is available through YesYes Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including New England Review, Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in Mississippi Review and Yemassee, where she was awarded the 2016 Nonfiction Prize. Another of her poems from this series on cryptids and creatures won Baltimore Review’s 2017 Summer Contest. The recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Studios of Key West, she lives in Idyllwild, California, where she is Poet-in-Residence at Idyllwild Arts Academy.
Of Capra-Thomas’s poem, Jane Miller writes:
I’ve chosen “At Publix, the Florida Skunk Ape Hunts Dangerous Game” because the poet, through a surrogate, has forced us to see how absurd our human constructions are, and, worse, how destructive are some of our passions. But it is the writer’s sense of an ending that I find most compelling. This, above the other distinguished poems, extends its inquiry into philosophical and spiritual realms. Rather than conclude with a further description of the place and time in the poem, or rather than conclude with a comparison to other worlds, extending the trope further imaginatively— both worthy poetic enterprises!— this poet risks a leap into another mode, from lyric and narrative all the way to the meditative — and by doing so, speaks directly to ethical questions about human responsibility.
Bios of our judges
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road (2019). Her other books are Labrador (1988), The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (1993), Hell: A Novel (1998), The Walking Tour (1999), Versailles (2002), The Thin Place (2006) and Duplex (2013). She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, she won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of The Writing Program at Washington University.
You can read an excerpt from Kathryn Davis’s newest novel, The Silk Road, at Conjunctions. And, our favorite excerpt of course, was in The Translucent Issue of Fairy Tale Review.
Jane Miller has published ten books of poetry, including the National Poetry Series Selection, The Greater Leisures; August Zero, Western State Book Award winner; and A Palace of Pearls, recipient of the Audre Lorde Award for Poetry. She’s also written Thunderbird, a book-length sequence of short poems, and Midnights, poetry and prose poems published with Saturnalia Press as part of their artist/poet Collaboration Series. Who Is Trixie the Trasher? And Other Questions is her newest book from Copper Canyon. Currently Visiting Poet at The University of Texas Michener Center, Miller is the recipient of a Wallace Foundation Award for Poetry, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
You can read and listen to Jane Miller’s recent fairy-tale poem “Whether the Goat is a Metaphor” at The New Yorker.
All our winners, runners-up, and finalists
Prose
Winner:
“The Sleeping Girl” by Skye Anicca
Runner-up:
“Ghost Lights” by Carlea Holl-Jensen
Finalists:
“Citrus Problems in the Home Landscape” by Brendan Egan
“Providence” by Thirii Myint
Poetry
Winner:
Caylin Capra-Thomas, “At Publix, the Florida Skunk Ape Hunts Dangerous Game”
Runner-up:
Natalie Wang, “Apples”
Finalists:
“Myth of the Yucatan Chara, Or the Past Lives of Mothers” by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
“Baba Yaga, Detroit” by Mary Kaiser
“Detective in Summer” by Jacob Lindberg
“At the Lost Children’s Memorial Garden” by Dawn Manning
“Thallus” by Leslie Miller
“Rainbow Road” by Rainie Oet
“Rubah” by Jeddie Sophronius
“Getting My Body Back” by Sara Moore Wagner
