THE INNER ELSEWHERE - Syrah Linsley
The Inner Elsewhere is a lyric memoir-in-essays imagining the shapes we might make within relationships if we leave room for solitude and distance. Part creation myth, part love letter, the manuscript becomes a journey to find ourselves where we once found each other: in the mystery of a blank page.
"I cocked my head as if reading a map, as if watching an amphibian dissected in biology class. Their inner worlds, like ours, could be mistaken for mountain ranges."
Bio: Syrah Linsley (she/her) is an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she is writing a nonfiction manuscript. Her work has received support from various colonies as well as first-place prizes from Bennington’s international Young Writers Awards and from the Liberal Arts Network for Development.She lives in Michigan.
*SHORTLIST* PISSANT - Jubi Arriola-Headley
photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
In 1980's Boston, a Black teenager faces racism, the AIDS epidemic, his immigrant father's hypermasculinity – and his own queer desires. Exploring barrooms, bathrooms, bookstores, and beyond, he discovers a world of kink and embarks on a turbulent sexual journey to find his authentic self.
“The air vibrated different, hummed, buzzed, the temperature rose a couple degrees when Daddy walked in. I could see – what I really want to say is I could smell (so strongly I could almost taste it) how the other men got physically, demonstrably, visibly, measurably excited when Daddy walked into Hazel’s place. It was not necessarily a sexually-charged energy – not that those men would ever admit – but an undeniably, though I couldn’t name it so at the time, sensual energy, in the way that men cleave to other men when they want to engage in collective release, a literal or metaphorical circle jerk, which, based on my limited experience in the world, seems to most often take the form of violence, enacted as pornography or sports or legislation or rampage, upon women or schoolchildren or poor folks or immigrants or themselves and each other.”
Bio: Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/him) is the author of two poetry collections: ORIGINAL KINK and Bound (forthcoming in January 2024 from Persea Books). Black, queer, and a first-generation United Statesian, Jubi’s writing explores themes of masculinity, vulnerability, rage, tenderness & joy. Learn more at www.justjubi.com
*SHORTLIST*OCTOPUS WOMB - Layla O’Mara
Octopus Womb is one woman’s investigation of her own body for the first time in forty years. Using her training as an acupuncturist as an anchor, she explores the aftershock of a traumatic pregnancy and birth, questions why she experiences an almost constant panic in herself and unearths the crop-mark histories that her body retains.
“I have been lured to these outskirts where magic might happen, I am hungry for any bit of wilderness that the city offers up. I want to get my hands dirty, to wade and trawl, to taste the alchemy of jagged weed transformed into smooth soup.”
Bio: Layla (she/her) lives with her family in rural Co. Wicklow, Ireland. She has a degree in English and Theatre Studies, was ‘highly commended’ for a short story by the Bridport Prize and has written and directed work in the Dublin Fringe Festival. As well as writing, Layla now works as a Five Element Acupuncturist. Instagram :: @mslaylaomara
*SHORTLIST* HOW TO DIE LIKE A GIRL - Patricia Stacey
When my beautiful mother was diagnosed with hysteria in 1969, she immersed herself in the sexual revolution, dragging me along with her on a rollicking, dangerous adventure to prove that sex could be an antidote to heartbreak. My solace was my “family” of intellectual misfits. Could we be saved?
“A remnant of my years of living with Jake, I couldn’t help but collect little stories from my day: married ex-nun in bookstore recommends the Kama Sutra to an old man; psycho on Shattuck says he knows the color of my underwear, guesses correctly; street performer trades facts for money to tourist, revealing that James Dean died with multiple cigarette burns on his body; kangaroos have three vaginas—why, I wonder? To make room for two Johns and a Joey?”
Bio: Patricia Stacey (she/her) grew up during second-wave feminism and has been writing this memoir for over ten years. She has written for O, The Oprah Magazine and The New York Times and is the author of The Boy Who Loved Windows; Opening The Mind And Heart of a Child Threatened with Autism (Perseus 2003).
*SHORTLIST* MY MUM WAS A GARDENER - Sarah Forbes
My mum died in the autumn and at first I clung on. I had done death before and I could do it again. But come the winter my life was unravelling. I started to garden and as the seasons rolled by I discovered my past, present and future all hidden within the soil.
"My mum was a gardener but by the end she was so small. She was shrinking, withering. Now she was a tiny speck in a bed and I could only see her on a screen."
Bio: Sarah Forbes (she/her) is a classically trained singer and theatre maker living in Brighton (UK). She found herself writing after the sudden death of her mum in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize 2023.
*SHORTLIST* QUILT - Hanne Shapiro Steen
Quilt is a memoir that uses journal entries as scaffolding to tell the story of an uncommon life. The daughter of anti-establishment parents who moved their kids to Africa when she was a child, the narrator cuts up, rearranges, and sews back together memories and musings from old journals in an attempt to make sense of the chaos of growing up without a cultural or geographical through-line. From Rwanda to London to Nairobi to Los Angeles, through the nineties and aughts, from addiction to recovery, from loving to losing and loving again, blending fantasy with reality, the author patches the disparate pieces of her life into a narrative all her own.
“We’ll slide down the surface of things, Brett Easton Ellis says. Not here we won’t. We’ll peel back the skin and let it all hang out, legs akimbo, screaming at the screaming waves, fighting for life with a glimmer of golden teeth, a shake of meaty ass, a swig of icy beer. Slide down no surface here. Here we walk barefoot through the trash in the street, here we die all at once of yellow fever, or of broken, festering hearts.”
Bio: Hanne Shapiro Steen (she/her) is an American psychotherapist and writer. She was a 2014 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her stories have been published in Fugue and PANK, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.
SHED 1,000 BODIES - Julie Lambert
Shed 1,000 Bodies is a coming-of-age memoir that grapples with loss of innocence, grief, culpability, and responsibility. In the aftermath of a boating accident, I ask: how does one live after unintentionally causing catastrophic injury to another? How does one forgive oneself? How does one make amends for irreparable harm?
“This was where my cousins and I spent our summer days, where diapers buried in sand surfaced again years later when water levels rose, where my older boy cousins hooted and hollered in the hills and trees above, building secluded sky high forts, where younger cousins walked the shoreline, scanning and stooping for agates hidden among rocks, seaweed, and minnows shimmering in shallow water, and where everyone in the family—aunts, uncles, and cousins alike—gathered for meals of fried sunfish coated with crushed saltines, mayonnaisey coleslaw, and watermelon seed spit fights across the picnic table.”
Bio: Julie Lambert (she/her) has been writing novels and poetry since she was a kid and kept her writing in an old Valentine’s Day candy box. Obsessed with old houses, vintage jewelry and birth, she lives outside of Chicago with her husband and four children, and is a birth and postpartum doula.
AS FAR AS I KNOW - Danielle Cadena Deulen
photo credit: Sean Patrick
As far As I Know is from a manuscript-in-progress of personal essays titled I Don’t Belong Here about interpersonal and sociological misunderstandings, misconnections, misinterpretations, and generally not fitting in. In these lyric, psychological explorations, I invite the reader into my experience as a bi-ethnic, bisexual, neurodivergent and traumatized person constantly performing “normalcy” in various American cultures and subcultures.
“I was so angry, I refused to speak anymore. Why speak? They’d already made up their minds to send me to my death,” she said, nearly spitting. She hardly looked at the road any longer, and each time she looked toward me, the car leaned in the direction of her gaze, the long fields of grass winding closer, then farther, then closer. My heart lurched at two competing impulses: to grab the wheel (to rebuke her incompetence) or to remain with my arms across my chest (to be a good girl)."
Bio: Danielle Cadena Deulen (she/her) teaches for the graduate creative writing program at Georgia State University in Atlanta and hosts the podcast, Lit from the Basement. She is the author of a memoir and three poetry collections, most recently Desire Museum, forthcoming from BOA Editions in fall 2023. Find her at danielledeulen.net
THE BOOK OF ESTHER - Lara Tupper
Photo Credit - Elaina Mortali
The Book of Esther is a memoir-in-progress about family secrets. My father, a member of Congress in the 1960's, carried great sadness. I saw this in him and carried it too. In The Book, I pose the questions I couldn’t ask him.
“I wasn’t born yet when Esther died. I was about to be born and this may have been part of the problem.”
Bio: Lara Tupper (she/her) is the author of three works of fiction: Amphibians (winner, Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize), Off Island (finalist, Housatonic Book Award) and A Thousand and One Nights. She is also a jazz/folk performer who has traveled the world; her latest album is This Dance. www.laratupper.com
KATIE DIDN’T STAND A CHANCE - Nina Barufaldi
Katie Didn’t Stand a Chance braids a dual timeline creative nonfiction story of Katherine Miller, a dynamic Irish-American woman struggling with catastrophic alcoholism in still puritanical 1940’s Springfield, Massachusetts with her granddaughter Nina's present day fight to escape Katherine's tragic legacy.
“The church only ever gave me one thing in the form of Viola Carpenter. She doesn’t matter much, she was just a stubborn mule of a Deacon’s wife who squirmed in her ugly wool suit, but I give credit where credit is due. It was Viola, scratching at her skirts, who introduced us to Archibald Henry and his daughter Josephine at the Union Station Newstand and Cafe.”
Bio: Nina Barufaldi (she/her) was shortlisted for the 2019 Best American “Shortest” story and is halfway through a MFA with the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast creative writing program. Barufaldi draws inspiration from the rugged social and physical landscapes of New England and infuses her writing with a strong focus on character.
GHOST STORY: A MEMOIR - P.L. Watts
When a woman “rescues” her grandchildren from unprepared parents, she sparks decades of death and destruction. Set in the Southwest Florida swamp, Ghost Story weaves through the worlds of spirit and philosophy, exploring themes of family, memory, and love, using elements of gothic horror to interrogate the nature of memoir.
“Shortly after noon on April Fool’s Day 1985, they transferred two suitcases, one box of diapers, three bottles, and the stolen babies to a nondescript grey beater, ditching their distinctive “Roachmobile” at Miami International Airport with ticket stubs to California for the authorities to eventually find. It would be four hours before the children were missed, six before the police would take the frantic calls seriously, and another before a squad car would finally be sent out to search. By then they’d be out of the state.”
Bio: P. L. Watts (she/her) escaped the Florida foster care system and mentors in PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. Her personal essays have appeared in Ruminate, New Letters, Nightmare Magazine, and elsewhere. Her queer, gothic novella The Bonny Swans came out in January. Find her online at plwatts.com
*SHORTLIST* AMREEKA - Ahmed Kabil
Deep in the heart of post-9/11 Texas, sixteen-year-old Ahmed learns about the America imagined by the 1960s counterculture — and sets off to find it. Blending memoir and history, Amreeka is a tragicomic coming-of-age story of an Arab American’s long, strange trip to discover where he’s really from.
"But the question of where I was from was never one of math, just as it was never one of geography. And I rarely answered it to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of the people asking. For there was always a second question lying in wait behind the first, to be asked anytime I answered incorrectly, anytime I tried to lay claim to a sense of belonging to a place that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I had not earned: No, but like: where are you really from?"
Bio: Ahmed Kabil (he/him) is an Egyptian American writer based in Barcelona. He is currently studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Visit him at www.med.earth
*SHORTLIST* CÁLLATE! - R. Gurley
Cállate! details a rape that became a nationally televised trial in Bolivia confronting its epidemic gender-based violence as well as its practice of silencio. A newly-widowed middle-aged teacher takes a job in Bolivia, expecting a happy ending. Serial rapists leave her fighting for her life and justice instead.
Moonlight sneaks between his fingers. His hand presses down on my nose. My eyes water. Moonlight blurs. His face moves closer to mine. His breath hot, smells like Pollo a la Lena, chicken roasted by flame. He hisses.
Cállate!
This word sounds like a demand. My hand scrambles for my purse.
Bio: R. Gurley (she/her), MA, MFA, is a writer and English teacher with over 20 years of experience with words, whose works have appeared in Coping Magazine, Lehigh Valley Woman’ s Journal, and Midwifery Monthly. She also edits Copper Mountain College’s Literary Review HOWL in Joshua Tree, CA. Her work can be found at www.medium.com/@reneegurley and www.rgurleyrevolution.com
CLEOFAS - Candace Eros Diaz
Cleofas is a fictional account of my great-grandmother Cleofas’s life in Durango, Mexico, the series of events that led to her migration to California, and the ways she (re)discovers, (re)imagines, and (re)claims her identity as an Indigenous Mexican woman, wife, and mother becoming an American.
"I knew it was bad luck to let one's hair fly free in a breeze. Anyone could pick it up and use it for magic. I knew this because my mother had taught me this was so."
Bio: Candace Eros Diaz (she/they) is a queer Xicana novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She is currently based in Lisjan Ohlone territory also known as Oakland, California. Find her on Twitter @CandaceErosDiaz
*SHORTLIST* TWO HALVES - Nadia Diggory
Two Halves is a short memoir about mixed-race sisters Nadia and Saira, who are raised as twins and speak as one. Nadia’s coming-of-age sees her find her own voice against a backdrop of unspoken family trauma around her sister’s disability, and the burgeoning identity of an island, post-independence.
“We learn to walk, barefooted, holding on. Table. Sofa. Windowsill. Each other. Three good legs between us.”
Bio: Nadia Diggory (she/her) is an Anglo-Mauritian writer of diaspora fiction and creative nonfiction, and she is currently working on a short story collection on the theme of female dislocation. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University
ROSE OF SARON - Judith Krummeck
Christianna Lässle entered the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania in 1736 and took the spiritual name, Sister Föben. Music played an essential part at the cloister, and amongst the preserved hymns are several written by Föben, making her one of the first named female composers in America. This is her story.
“When Christianna entered what was about to become the Ephrata Cloister at the age of nineteen in the late fall of 1736, she surrendered everything, absolutely and without reserve, as was expected and required. In truth, she had very little to surrender other than the clothes she stood up in.”
Bio: Judith Krummeck (she/her) is the author of a memoir-in-essays, Beyond the Baobab, and a biographical-memoir, Old New Worlds. Her debut novel, The Deceived Ones, is forthcoming in Spring 2024. Judith holds an MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts, and she’s the evening drive-time host for Baltimore’s classical music station, WBJC.