We are delighted to announce that our brilliant judge, Manuel Gonzales, has selected the winners of this year’s The Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize. We consider it our privilege to have spent time with so many terrific submissions—thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work!
Winner: Cassandra Garbus for “Hillside Homes”
Of Garbus’ story, Gonzales writes, “It’s difficult to articulate what I find so striking and compelling about ‘Hillside Homes,’ but I have read it more than a few times now, perhaps because of its simple and spare narrative voice, or the subtle emotional power that lives just under its surface, or its ability, with its granular attention to grief and love, to evoke something both familiar and heartbreaking–but regardless, I am drawn back to it time and again.”
CASSANDRA GARBUS is the author of the novel Solo Variations. Her stories have appeared in many publications, including Meridian, Louisiana Literature, The Texas Review, The Cortland Review, and a best of the web anthology. Since March of 2020, when COVID-19 first spiked in New York City, she has rediscovered her love for her native city and its people. She is at work on a new novel as well as stories about the lockdown experience in her neighborhood.
Runner-up: Sabrina Helen Li for “Grief Song”
Of Li’s story, Gonzales writes, “Grief Song is, like ‘Hillside Homes,’ yet another story of death and grief and the withering and dissolution of a relationship—of a few different relationships—but with robot daughters and robot wives and professional criers thrown in as well, the author providing us a beautiful story both grounded enough and strange enough to clarify our strange and ungrounded times.”
SABRINA HELEN LI is a writer from New Jersey. Her short fiction is published or forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Tin House Online, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Black Warrior Review, and The Los Angeles Review. She recently won the Boston Review’s 2019 Aura Estrada Short Story Contest and was a 2020 Tin House Scholar. Sabrina graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in English and is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently working on a short story collection about parents putting themselves up for adoption, a Chinese WeChat Greek chorus, and a grandmother silently moving into her family’s air duct.
Our deepest thanks to Manuel Gonzales for judging, to The Burdine Johnson Foundation for their generous support of this contest, and to all of you for submitting your stories. And congrats to the winners! Look out for the winning story in an upcoming issue of American Short Fiction!