Below are the winners and finalists of the 2020 contests, which closed January 15, 2020.
John Ciardi Prize for Poetry
We are pleased now to announce the winning manuscript, Flowers as Mind Control by Laura Minor of Jacksonville, Florida. The final judge was John Hodgen.
BkMk Press congratulates the finalists:
Paul David Adkins
Regina DiPerna
Sonia Greenfield
Peter Krumbach
David Moolten
Virginia Sutton
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen
Michele Wolf
Cecilia Woloch
Laura Minor will receive a $1,000 prize plus book publication by BkMk Press in 2021. Laura Minor won the 2019 International Literary Awards, Rita Dove Poetry Award and was a finalist for the 2019 National Poetry Series. Her poems have recently appeared in The Missouri Review, Arc Magazine Canada, and Quiddity. New poems are forthcoming in North American Review, Barnhouse Journal, South Carolina Review, and the 2020 New Rivers Press anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose.
G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction
We are pleased now to announce the winning manuscript, This Is Not My Country by Amin Ahmad of Durham, North Carolina. The final judge was Stephanie Powell Watts.
BkMk Press congratulates the finalists:
Carrie Grinstead
David Hopes
Wayne Karlin
Buku Sarkar
Amin Ahmad will receive a $1,000 prize plus book publication by BkMk Press in 2021. Amin Ahmad grew up in India, came to America as a teenager, and worked as a banker and an architect before giving up on the American dream, and becoming a full-time writer. After living in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington DC, he now resides in Durham, NC. His work has appeared in Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Slice, and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Duke University.