Announcing The Gertrude Stein Award 2014 Winners

We are so very pleased to announce our Gertrude Stein Award Winners for 2014. It was a difficult decision, as we received so many fantastic submissions from truly talented writers. Please join us in celebrating our winners and finalists:

1st Place
“A Song Died” by Andrew McLinden

Among the many ways to describe good fiction is the tried but true “simultaneous inevitability and surprise.” It’s an added pleasure when surprise comes wrapped in a package of what could or should be expected. Grief as conflict is not a stranger to fiction; the extents, extremes, depths, and varied quiet subtleties of grief have been effectively plumbed. It may not be an exhaustible topic. But in Andrew McLinden’s “A Song Died,” to see the daily vacuum of a brother grieving for his sister carried a surprising impact, in the who, the how, as well as the pitch and tone of the telling. If not for particulars in the character’s life, the details and sensibility of his grief could have created a genderless character experience, thus the somewhat off-the-beaten-path sibling grief ­— siblings of different genders and not twins — finds a freshly effective intensity. (Cris Mazza, Judge Gertrude Stein Award 2014)

2nd Place
“Insecticide” by Rachel Goldman

3rd Place
“Song of the Amputee’s Mother” by Shanee Stepakoff

2014 Gertrude Stein Award Finalists

“Winterriese” by Sara Baker

“Peaches” by Sarah Gerard

“Anonymity of Faces” by Kirk Glaser

“The Birds on Peach Street” by Anabel Graff

“Rhonda Belle and the Butterfly” by Chad Halliday

“Down the Street that Lady Comes” by Robert Krantz

“Passed into the Fire of Molech” by Hunter Liguore

“People in Jail” by Linda McCullough Moore

“Waterhead” by Terry Mergenthal

“The White Envelope” by Sophie Monatte

“Another Man’s Wife” by Nicole Mullis

“The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso” by Zana Previti

“Gods” by Vernon Pua

“Things You Can’t Forget” by Sara Taylor

“Fruit Loops” by Alice Urchin

“The Rooms We Rented” by Robert Vaughan

“Violins” by Luke Wiget

 

Rue Cris MazzaOur guest judge for the Gertrude Stein Award 2014 is the awarded author, Cris Mazza, whose hybrid memoir, Something Wrong with Her, is out now with Jaded Ibis Press. We encourage you to experience the talent and lyricism of Cris Mazza’s words. It has been an honor working with her here at Eckleburg.

SUBMIT NOW: Gertrude Stein Award 2015

Our Gertrude Stein Award 2015 will be judged by our excellent panel of judges and authors including Weston Cutter, Mary Krienke, Mary Stein and Natanya Ann Pulley. Read more about our 2015 judges below. You can read past winners in Eckleburg No. 18.

Eckleburg-No-18

Read the winning stories in the upcoming Eckleburg No. 19. Read last year’s GS Award winning stories in Eckleburg No. 18guest-judged by Rick Moody.

2015 Contest Judges

Weston_Cutter-Weston_CutterWeston Cutter is from Minnesota. His work has been published in Ploughshares and The Rumpus. He is the author of You’d Be a Stranger, Too and All Black Everything. He’s an assistant professor at the University of St Francis and runs the book review website Corduroy Books.
Mary_Krienke_DrTJEMary Krienke grew up in the Midwest and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Fiction Program and has been previously published by Midwestern GothicTwo Hawks QuarterlyJoyland, and Underground Voices, with work forthcoming in Palooka. Now an associate literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, she is currently writing her first novel.
SteinMary Stein lives in Minneapolis where she’s the assistant editor of Conduit literary magazine and works as a teaching artist. Her fiction has appeared in Caketrain, The Brooklyn Rail, and Spartan Lit. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for New Stories from the Midwest.
Natanya_Pulley-Natanya_Ann_PulleyNatanya Ann Pulley is half-Navajo (Kiiyaa’aanii and Tachiinii clans). She has a PhD in Fiction Writing from the University of Utah and is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Dakota. A writer of primarily fiction and non-fiction with outbreaks in poetry, Natanya’s publications include Western Humanities Review, The Florida Review, Drunken Boat, and McSweeney’s Open Letters (among others).
The Editors