1st Place ($300)

Turn of the Century

by Grace Fetterman

I WAS BORN and raised in the town where everybody claims to be Somebody, 90 hours a year are spent seething in traffic, and if you look closely at the children careening through the park like horses, you will realize...read more

2nd Place ($200)

Working Back to the Old Place

by Richard Hague

AFTER HIS FIRST visit to this 1890 beauty of a building my wife and I purchased in Madisonville in l981, my brother confided to my mother that he would never buy a "used" house...read more

3rd Place ($100)

Some Things I Know Today

by Sally Bittner Bonn

I KEEP PUTTING this orange sweater on. The orange sweater I bought from Target a year ago November to hide the pregnancy that didn’t work out. The sweater I thought I might never wear again. I pull it close around my body to brace against this winter’s cold... read more

Honorable Mention ($50)

My Love Affair

With Annabelle Banner

by Carol Edelstein

FIRST IT MUST be said that she, my dental hygienist, Annabelle Banner, is one of only nineteen living persons who have touched me deeply inside my personal space, and we did it on the very first encounter...read more

Honorable Mention ($50)

Impact

by Robert W. Maddamma

WHEN I HIT the ground, I couldn’t breathe. I laid limp, unable to react to the blood dripping from my mouth. I must have bitten my lip. I wasn’t sure; I was only five years old...read more

I Am Stretched On Your Grave/

Sinéad O'Connor

by Michael Allen Potter

WHEN ENSIGN RECORDS released Sinéad O’Connor’s second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, I was a twenty-year-old Ivy League dropout back in my hometown, completely unsure about the trajectory of my own sexuality...read more

Come On Billy, Light My Fire

by Geoffrey Neil

I QUIT SMOKING at 11. It was after a summer of mischief that fell just shy of hellraising. My best friend, Billy, was a grade ahead of me and the pack of Marlboros and Zippo he flaunted were about all I knew of his middle school education...read more

En Pointe

by Patricia Roth Schwartz

SHE WAS ONLY seven but in it from the beginning—longing to be a dancer—for the wardrobe only: the desire to wear pink satin toe shoes and a fluffy tutu. The lesson she learned...read more

Trees and Dogs

by Peter Teall

A BOY BORN in winter. A boy raised on an island hill over a sea of rooftops, a lawn-mown quilt of greens and grays. A boy, feral and Catholic. A boy running with dogs, his closest companions...read more