We are pleased to announce that the winner of our annual Big Fish Lyric Essay Contest is "Epic Manliness" by Vincent Guerra! Stay tuned as we will post the piece right here on CutBank Online at some point in the coming couple of weeks. Thank you to everyone that submitted to the contest. We look forward to hearing from you again next year!
The Literary Journal of the University of Montana
Announcing our 2024 Genre Contest Winners:
April 23, 2024
We are excited to announce the winners and finalists of the 2024 CutBank Genre Contests, judged by Christine Byl, Toni Jensen, and Christina Olson. We appreciate every submission we get — thank you for the opportunity to read your work. The winning stories will be published in CutBank 101 this summer.
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Winner, Montana Prize in Nonfiction: “Kansas Tries to Say Goodbye” by Ruby Hansen Murray
Judged by Toni Jensen
Praise for “Kansas Tries to Say Goodbye” from Toni Jensen: “In “Kansas Tries to Say Goodbye,” Ruby Hansen Murray centers Osage language reclamation and community building in its rightful home on the South Plains. This essay shows the importance of language and land while also telling the compelling story of the language teachers, their histories and processes and deep commitment. The essay’s images and language carry the beauty and motion of the place and people with grace and love. It’s a beautiful portrait of connection.”
Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News and a MacDowell and Hedgebrook fellow. Find her in Cascadia: A Field Guide, Ecotone, Pleiades, Moss, World Literature Today, the Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus, and Colorlines. She’s a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations with West Indian roots living along the Columbia River.
2024 Nonfiction Contest Finalists:
“Things Not to Be Said” by Gabriel Furshong
"Jesus and the Gavacha" by Carrie Hall
"Jennifer’s Room, Sadeta’s Job, My House" by Isabelle Stillman
“A True Fiction" by Rachael Weaver
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Winner, Montana Prize in Fiction: “Joining the Pack” by E. Klein
Judged by Christine Byl
Praise for “Joining the Pack” from Christine Byl: “I have always been fascinated by the lives of dogs, and believe them to be kin to humans, yet it’s the rare story that can inhabit an animal’s consciousness without raising my hackles. E. Klein’s “Joining the Pack” is a rare story—inventive but unselfconscious, empathetic but not sentimental, and weird in the best possible way. With choices of diction, syntax and rhythm, the story creates its own logic, making for a nimble, imaginative romp that grabs a reader by the scruff and licks our sorrows into belonging.”
E. William Klein is from Ketchikan, Alaska, and worked in the commercial fishing industry there for 8 years. He received his MFA in Fiction from the Helen Zell Writer's program at the University of Michigan in 2016. His writing was awarded Honorable Mention in Bellevue Literary Review's 2024 Goldberg Prize for Fiction and has otherwise appeared in Carve and MQR.
2024 Fiction Contest Finalists:
"Losing It" by Conor Hogan
“Stones Unturned” by Matthew Pitt
"Let That Be Your Pill” by Stacey Resnikoff
“Hammer and Tongs" by Brian Roberts
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Winner, Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry: “Sometimes when I am traveling alone I think of having a drink again in an airport bar” by Caitlin Scarano
Judged by Christina Olson
Praise for “Sometimes when I am traveling alone I think of having a drink again in an airport bar” by Christina Olson: "I love a good narrative poem, and "Sometimes when I am traveling alone I think of having a drink again in an airport bar" isn't a good narrative poem, it's a great one. We're in the airport with our speaker, wrestling with the dilemma to break seven years of sobriety, and then here comes the father, singing and cooing to his rotten liver. The airport is littered with men, their suitcase wheels making noise, and the father, not in the airport but riding on the shoulders of the speaker, and the estranged family, and the limitations of the body. Our speaker weaves all this trauma into a brief, shining story of abuse and heartbreak and--most essentially--survival. Sometimes we sit next to strangers at airport bars to hear stories; sober or not, you don't need to make friends over a $17 Heineken when you have this poem, which is better than any story a businessman connecting through DFW could tell you anyway.”
Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full length collection of poems,* The Necessity of Wildfire*, was a finalist for the WA State Book Award. Find her at caitlinscarano.com.
2024 Patricia Goedicke Contest Runner-Up:
"Shortly Before the New Year" by Brent Schaeffer (to be published in issue #101 also!)
2024 Patricia Goedicke Contest Finalists:
“The Passion” and other poems by Daniel DeVaughn
"What the Othered Can’t Have" and other poems by Rosa Lane
“we had a picnic” and other poems by Nicole Santalucia
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Announcing our 2023-2024 Big Sky, Small Prose Winners:
WINNER: Julia LoFaso, “Water Healing”
Praise from guest judge Micah Fields:
"I want to tap my own spring," LoFaso asserts in the concluding lines of "Water Healing," a masterfully concise essay about bridges and the power of what lies beneath them. Like most great essays, LoFaso's brings the reader along in the process--however messy and winding it may be--of the writer's honest search for something (meaning, truth, memory, beauty, connection, et al.) As "Water Healing" insightfully toggles between the practice of hydropathy, the saga of the Brooklyn Bridge's construction, and the author's own draw to the water as a link between present and past selves, we are there to draw the invisible lines connecting stories, learning in real-time to construct the tension cables and calculate curves the way engineer John Roebling's wife Emily did when "water-curing" could not save his life. LoFaso's meditation on postpartum existence and the draw of water builds an intricate collage worth studying again and again.
Julia LoFaso is writing a hybrid collection about weird motherhood and various forms of solace seeking. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, and others. More of her writing is available at julialofaso.com.
RUNNER-UP: Elita Suratman, “Brown Paper Package”
Praise from guest judge Micah Fields:
In a brief yet moving recollection, "Brown Paper Package" explores the author's relationship with the culinary ephemera of Ramadan, a tradition the writer has "long transgressed since moving to the U.S." Each delicately rendered image in the essay forms the author's own "private cultural cache," a chorus of carefully wrapped pastries and Malay spices that conjure scents of a life once lived far away. To open the package each year is a kind of homecoming and aching nostalgia for the author, as bittersweet as the parcel's contents.
Elita Suratman emigrated from Singapore with dreams of following in her father’s footsteps as a writer. A master’s degree, family and a twenty-year marketing career later, she’s discovering her writing roots, working on a cross-continent memoir on her flyway toward self-identity. Excerpts can be found in Flights and Herstry. You can find more of her work here: http://elitasuratman.com/.
RUNNER-UP: Alan Sincic, “Fuse”
Praise from guest judge Micah Fields:
"Fuse" is a thrilling and crafty little sentence of an essay. It's a piece of art about art, which is to say it's about everything, and the writer handles the scope of this task with a deft hand. The work is playful and profound. Not only did I love reading it, but it reminded me why I love reading.
Alan's fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Boulevard Online, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Recent stories won contests sponsored by Hunger Mountain, Prime Number, The Texas Observer, Orison, Meridian, Azure and others. You can visit him at alansincic.com.