We are thrilled to announce the winners for this year’s American Short(er) Fiction Prize, judged by National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson. Thank you to everyone who submitted—it is always uplifting to read your work. Congratulations to the winners!
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First-Place Prize:
“A High School Production of Titus Andronicus” by Greg Schutz
Judge Brandon Hobson writes, “‘A High School Production of Titus Andronicus’ is an extraordinary exploration of family and grief. Written in spare, rich prose, this story does what all great stories do—carry a great emotion for the human condition with a payoff that leaves you thinking about it long after you’ve finished reading it.”
Greg Schutz‘s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Sycamore Review, New Stories from the Midwest, Masters Review Anthology X, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with his partner and their terrier.
Second-Place Prize:
“Dievas X” by DS Sulaitis
“Beautifully crafted, ‘Dievas X’ carries a heavy weight of loneliness and isolation in such a short space,” Hobson writes. “The result is a heartbreaking collective of memory and the present. I loved it.”
DS Sulaitis‘s fiction has been published three times in Boston Review, as well as other literary journals. She has received three New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships in fiction and creative nonfiction, and a generous grant for a novel in progress from the Elizabeth George Foundation.
Brandon Hobson is the author of the recent novel, The Removed, Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Reading the West Award; and other books. His fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, NOON, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from the UCROSS Foundation and Ragdale, he teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Hobson is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.
Congratulations to the winners, and many thanks to Brandon Hobson!
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