3rd Place Creative Nonfiction: "Quilt" by 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.