The Pinch  is generously supported by a grant from the Hohenberg Foundation and is distributed nationally by Ingram Periodicals.

The Pinch Literary Awards in Fiction and Poetry

Sponsored by the Hohenberg Foundation

Fiction First Prize: $1,500.00
Poetry First Prize: $1,000.00

Winners 2007
Judged by Pam Houston
and Linda Gregerson

Winners 2008
Judged by Jason Brown
and Sandra Meek

This year, the Fiction Contest will be judged by Jason Brown from
The University of Arizona, and Poetry will be judged by Sandra Meek from
Berry College.

CONTEST RULES

Only unpublished work will be considered. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, but notify us immediately if work is accepted elsewhere. No refunds will be issued.

Enclose the following with each entry:

• $20 for the first entry; $10 for each subsequent entry. Fiction entries should not exceed 5A,000 words. An “entry” in the poetry contest is three poems. Please include $10 for each group of three after the initial entry. Poems need not be related. Please make checks payable to The University of Memphis. No cash, please. The $20 entry fee also initiates a one-year subscription to The Pinch, except for international authors.
  
• A cover sheet that includes the author’s name, address, phone number, and email address. The author’s name should NOT appear on the manuscript itself. Personal information should NOT appear on the manuscript. Entries that do not adhere to this policy will be discarded unread. Please notify us if your address or email changes.
  
• An optional postcard for notification of receipt of entry and entry number.

INELIGIBLE

No translations will be considered.

Current students and faculty of The University of Memphis, as well as volunteer staff members for The Pinch, are not eligible.

Entries postmarked before January 15 and after March 15 will be discarded unread. Electronic submissions will not be considered.

We request all previous winners wait three years before submitting another manuscript to our contests.

PUBLICATION

All entries are considered for publication. First, second, and third place winners will be selected from each category. The first place fiction winner, along with all three poetry winners, will be published in the Spring issue following announcement. Second and third place winners in fiction will be given high-priority consideration for publication, but because of space, cannot be guaranteed. Due to the high volumes of submissions, any prize winners will be ineligible for contest participation for three years.

Manuscripts will NOT be returned.

Winners will be notified in June and announced in mid-September.

Send entries to:

Fiction Contest
The Pinch
Department of English
The University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152-6176

or

Poetry Contest
The Pinch
Department of English
The University of Memphis
Memphis, TN 38152-6176

JUDGES' BIOS

Jason Brown grew up in Maine. His first book of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories, was published by Norton in 1999. His second book of stories, Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was published in November of 2007 by Open City/Grove Atlantic. He splits his time between Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and Tucson where he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona.

Sandra Meek is the author of two books of poems, Nomadic Foundations (2002) and Burn (2005), and a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001). Her third book of poems, Biogeography, was the 2006 winner of the Dorset Award, and is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in November 2008. She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (2007). Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, and Prairie Schooner, among others, and she has twice been awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations, which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry. She is a co-founding editor of Ninebark Press and Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College.

We request all previous winners wait three years before submitting another manuscript to our contests.

2008 Contest Winners

Fiction- Judge: Jason Brown

1st place Anne Leigh Parrish	"Surrogate" Anne Leigh Parrish's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Clackamas Literary Review, Carve, Eleclectica Magazine, Fiction Warehouse, Amarillo Bay and elsewhere.  She lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband and two children, and has taught creative writing at both the University of Washington Women's Center and at the Richard Hugo House. Judge's Comments: In the deeply felt story Surrogate, Maggie and Donny lose their baby late in the pregnancy and don't know how to move on with their lives. Maggie finds hope in a surprising friendship with the neighbor's daughter, Shauna, the irrepressible soul of the story. Surrogate is a compelling and convincing portrayal of loss and transformation.
2nd place Jacob Appel	"Pollen" Jacob M. Appel teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City. His short fiction has appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including Agni, Greensboro Review, Missouri Review and Threepenny Review. Judge's Comments: Becky is determined to punish her cousin Charlotte in the story Pollen. Becky is the one we side with at first--brave, witty, rebellious. What starts out as a funny joke, though, devolves into a cruel game that eventually forces Becky to face her own unhappiness.
3rd place David Williams	"Strange Things Happen Every Day" David Williams is a Memphis newspaper editor and a fiction writer with several short story credits and two completed novels, The Long Gone Daddies and The Very Last Night. His blog on music and writing, is The Soundcheck & the Fury. Judge's Comments: In Strange Things Happen Every Day, a stranger comes to a small Mississippi town and announces he will walk across the Big Muddy, the Mississippi River, to Arkansas.  For an afternoon, the stranger becomes the focus of the town's hopes, fears, doubts, and prejudices.  The sharp eye of the narrative lens testifies to the power of the many small miracles that take place right in front of us while we wait for big events to transform our lives.

Poetry- Judge: Sandra Meek

1st place Rebecca Patrascu	"I am in Love with Old Men " Rebecca Patrascu has a BA in Writing from Dominican University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Journal, Tuxedo Literary Magazine, Agnieszka's Dowry, Stone Soup Newsletter, Women's Voices, The DMQ Review, Wild Hyperpoem, convolvulus and Pif Magazine. She lives in Northern California. Judge's Comments: I admired the strong voice of this poem. Through deceptively straight-forward language, the speaker—with equal parts humor and sincerity—builds her quirky celebration of “old men” to the poem’s dead-on ending image remembering these men’s lost youth’s transgressive power, when they once ”burned something alive with a glass and the sun.”
2nd place Pat Keller	"Group Therapy " Pat Landreth Keller has received a Georgia Council for the Arts Individual Artist Award for poetry and has published in a number of little magazines. Her story The Magician’s Assistant won the 2008 Mighty River short fiction competition. A poetry chapbook, “Draglinesis a 2008 Toadlily Press Quartet Series selection. Judge's Comments: I admired the imaginative movement of this poem, how the poem is a rich accumulation of varying (and competing!) interpretations of an apparent inkblot, ending with an evocative suggestion regarding how far apart we remain in our interpretations of ourselves and each other.
3rd place Mark Wagenaar	"From the Alchemist's Notebook " Mark Wagenaar is the only player, to his knowledge, to begin and end a professional soccer career under suspension. He has poetry published in Poetry East, Apalachee Review, Descant, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Portland Review, and many others. He is an MFA student of Charles Wright & Greg Orr at the University of Virginia. Judge's Comments: I admired the fluency of this poem, its increasingly rich and sure language, its wonderful moments, such as this one, how there “are no formulas,/ . . . to predict the storms named/for saints.”

2007 Contest Winners

Fiction- Judge: Pam Houston

1st place Mary Ziegler	"Scripture Cake"
	Though a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, Mary Ziegler calls Butte, Montana, home. Her fiction has appeared in Happy, Baybury Review, and American Writing, and is forthcoming in GSU Review. In addition to fiction, her writing interests include American legal history -- the intersection of law, science, society, gender.
2nd place Amber Gross	"Part Missing"
	Amber Gross is from North Dakota. She studied Art and Art History at Yale, and worked as a commercial actress in New York for several years. She now lives in Santa Monica, where she studies yoga and writes.
3rd place Anita Jones	"Hand-Me-Down Blues"
	Anita Jones is a writer, oral tradition storyteller, and visual artist. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art from Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina and was a contributing author in the anthology, Gardening Among Friends. Ms. Jones lives in northern California with her husband, daughter, four laying hens and a rabbit. She is grateful that you can take the woman out of Georgia but you can’t take Georgia out of the woman.

Poetry- Judge: Linda Gregerson

1st place Len Krisak	"Rilke: The Carousel"
	Len Krisak’s work has appeared in The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, PN Review, Commonweal, The Formalist, and The Oxford Book of Poems on Classical Mythology. His books include Even As We Speak (2000), If Anything (2004), and The Odes of Horace (a complete translation, 2006). The recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost Prizes, he is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
2nd place Brad Modlin	"What You Missed That Day You Were Absent From Fourth Grade"
	Brad Modlin is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University and Assistant Poetry Editor of Mid-American Review. This is his first publication.
3rd place Chris Baker	"18 Months (Saddle Shoes)"
	Chris Baker was born and raised in Alexander City, Alabama. His poetry has appeared in Confrontation, Proteus, Nerve Cowboy, and Seldom Nocturne. He was the recipient of the H.R. Hays Poetry Prize for his poem “The Mouse”. He currently lives in Birmingham where he teaches and writes.