We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize, judged by Daniel Mason. 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. Congratulations to the winners!
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First-Place Prize:
“The Skilled Anatomist” by Colleen Rosenfeld
Judge Daniel Mason writes, “‘The Skilled Anatomist’ takes a strange and beautiful conceit and runs with it, treading the uncanny space between the familiar and the fantastic.”
Colleen Rosenfeld lives in Claremont, California, where she is writing a collection of horror stories entitled Fetal Positions. She also writes literary criticism on Renaissance poetry and poetic theory in journals including Critical Inquiry, PMLA, and ELH and in a monograph, Indecorous Thinking (Fordham University Press, 2018). “The Skilled Anatomist” will be her first piece of published fiction.
Second-Place Prize:
“The Stone” by Anthony Varallo
And of Anthony Varallo’s story, Daniel Mason says, “‘The Stone’ is a beguiling, deceptively subversive story about an act both simple and heroic—kicking a stone across town—which transforms into a revelation of the narrator’s limitations.”
Anthony Varallo is the author of What Did You Do Today?, winner of the 2023 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. His other books include a novel, The Lines (University of Iowa Press), as well as four previous short story collections: This Day in History, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award; Out Loud, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; Think of Me and I’ll Know (Northwestern University Press); and Everyone Was There, winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Award. He is a professor of English at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing and serves as fiction editor of swamp pink literary journal.
Daniel Mason is author of The Piano Tuner, A Far Country, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent novel, North Woods, was a New York Times Bestseller, a New York Times and Washington Post Top 10 Book of 2023, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His writing has been translated into 28 languages, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. An assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
Our deepest thanks to Daniel Mason for judging, to The Burdine Johnson Foundation and the Tasajillo Residency for their generous support of this contest, and to all of you for submitting your stories. And congrats to the winners!