Thomas McConnell’s work has appeared in the Connecticut Review, the Cortland Review, Shenandoah, Birmingham Arts Journal, Calabash, Yemassee, the Emrys Journal, the Charleston Post & Courier, Crossroads: A Southern Annual, Writing Macao, and Ars Medica among other publications. His awards and prizes include an artist’s grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the South Carolina Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship, the Hackney National Literary Award for the Short Story, Porter Fleming Awards for Fiction, Essay, and Drama, the South Carolina Fiction Project, the H.E. Francis Award, and the Hardagree Award for Fiction. His lectures and readings have taken him to Istanbul, Berlin, and the Sorbonne in Paris. His collection of stories, A Picture Book of Hell and Other Landscapes, was published by Texas Tech University Press and nominated for the PEN/Bingham Award and the John Gardner Award for Short Fiction.
Finalists
“He led us to a small room that smelled like Windex and limes. Uli sat in the corner, watching me like he was waiting for me to dip out. When the needle pushed down into my chest I felt lightheaded and my hands started sweating…”
Dana Reva De Greff was born in Miami and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Miami. She is working on a novel-length version of “Miami Boys” and other stories.
“I took the beads in my hand and I told her, you want a miracle? You can see me right now, that’s a miracle. You can hear me, those ears, a miracle. You have hands—cigarette dangling from his lips, he lifted his hands in the air and shook them—and that’s a miracle…”
“My ribs snap to twigs and poke me in the chest. I don’t know how Tito got here, only hope that he didn’t take the same path as me—hopping trains and hiding in boxes and selling out to some coyote in hopes that he didn’t shoot me in the face and take my money anyway. The journey to America changes a man and surely Tito is no different…”
Adam Blake Wright is a dual degree graduate student at Iowa State University, where he pursues an MFA in Creative Writing and an MS in Sustainable Agriculture. As a Julia Child Foundation national food writing scholar, his work has appeared in Alimentum and Edible: Iowa River Valley. Adam most recently served as the nonfiction editor for Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, and previously worked as an arts educator in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, a majestic mountain oasis where he grew up on a 40-acre apple orchard.