Short Fiction Contest Introduction

We're so pleased that Mia Alvar joined us as guest judge for this year's Short Fiction Contest. Her collection of short stories is the kind of book that changes your understanding of what fiction can do. In the Country won the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Mia Alvar's work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, One Story, the Missouri Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.

Daphne Palasi Andreades, who received this year's prize, was generous enough to read her story for us while she was in Gambier for Writers Workshop this summer. You can see her reading on the new video page on our website (kenyonreview.org/videos/). You'll see other videos from our Reading Series posted to the site throughout the year.

Judge Mia Alvar writes:

Winner:

"Brown Girls" by Daphne Palasi Andreades

"Brown Girls" is a vibrant, pitch-perfect tale of growing up and making good, leaving home and looking back. The lives of young women of color from Queens, New York, leap off these pages through a collective voice that feels at once frank and poetic, unexpected, yet warmly familiar. In five — deceptively brief — vignettes, the author explores nuances of race and class, sex and marriage, family and community with great sensitivity and heart. And like the best short fiction, "Brown Girls" harnesses space and time masterfully, moving us through neighborhoods and cities, from first loves to future selves, all within 1,185 well-chosen words. With every stirring image and tight, musical turn of phrase, this story charmed, often surprised, and deeply moved me.

Runner-up:

"Solitária" by Emily Everett

The narrator is summoned to Rio to care for her ailing sister, a mercurial photographer of jungle landscapes and the animals who roam them. At her sister's dying wish, the narrator transforms a darkroom, humidifier by hothouse flower, into a rainforest habitat like that of the black panther, her sister's prize subject. "Solitária" beautifully weds the particulars of a place and a family with the universalities of love and loss. Is its (literally) wild denouement a stroke of magical realism, or the figment of a bereaved imagination? I think the answer is "yes," and it's a testament to this author's skillful plotting and inventive power that the story can have it both ways.

Runner-up:

"You Break It, You Own It" by Susan Falco

More than halfway through this story, a boy misreads a shop's posted "You Break It, You Own It" policy, to shocking and brutal consequences. But well before that, ominous signals and tension-laced sentences unmistakably convey the atmosphere of fear and dread that already governs his young life. Here, in prose both lyrical and efficient, is an unforgettable child's-eye view on the sometimes small yet infinitely devastating ways violence can remake itself.