Mirela Musić wins the 2024 Nonfiction Chapbook Prize

Guest judge Mary Cappello has chosen Mirela Musić’s “The Nature of Alaska: An Introduction to Familiar Plants, Animals & Outstanding Natural Attractions” as the winner of the Tusculum Review 2024 Nonfiction Chapbook Prize.

Cappello writes: “Nothing about this essay can be anticipated. If the title leads you to assume a travelogue is on offer, or a natural history tour of a place ‘elsewhere,’ think again. . . . Have I read this writer before? I don’t think so. I can’t wait to read more.”

Cappello chose Vanessa Micale’s “Boca del Lobo” for honorable mention, calling it “an imaginatively daring essay that reads like an extended prose poem on the violence, and politics, of language that holds, and severs, and drowns immigrants at the US southern border.”

Cappello also named Brandi Bird’s “What I Can’t Say” for honorable mention, writing: “ . . . Where does my memory begin and that of the ancestors end? What are the terms of a writer’s responsibility in a family of storytellers, whose secrets are in somewise sacred, and whose proper audience has yet to be determined?”

Read more about all three writers on our Contest page. Hear more about Mary Cappello’s judging process in the interview below.

Mary Cappello announces the 2024 Nonfiction Prizewinner

Z.T. Mitchell interviews guest judge Mary Cappello: a backstage look at the judging process, three striking essays, and Mary’s works-in-progress. For her blurbs of the writers’ work, see our Contest page.

Longlist | 2024 Nonfiction Chapbook Prize

The Tusculum Review is pleased to recognize fifteen finalists for the 2024 Nonfiction Chapbook Prize.

“What I Can’t Say” Brandi Bird
“Take Care” Serena Burman
“To Kill a Golden Fish” Kamyla Davis
“La Intermedia” Rebeca Dunn-Krahn
“Breakfast Sonnets” Makayla Gay
“The Knife Sharpener” Lise Haines
“Egoism in Eulogy” Victoria Inojosa
“The Yellowhammer’s Cross” Michael Loderstedt

“Boca Del Lobo” Vanessa Micale
“The Nature of Alaska” Mirela Musić
“Bookmarks” Lee Robinson
“Burying Chago” Morgan Smith
“A Night with the KKK” Morgan Smith
“Aaron and the Long Road Home” Gina Warren
“One Dark Blot” Bradley Whitehurst

2024 Nonfiction Chapbook Prize | Mary Cappello judges

A prize of $1,000, publication of the essay in The Tusculum Review’s 20th Anniversary Issue (2024), and creation of a limited edition stand-alone chapbook of the essay with original art is awarded.

Final judge Mary Cappello’s seven books of literary nonfiction include a Los Angeles Times bestselling detour on awkwardness; a lyric biography; the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In; and a speculative manifesto, Lecture.

Monic Ductan reads at Tusculum April 11

Monic Ductan, author of a Garden & Gun magazine “Best New Book for Southerners,” Daughters of Muscadine, and the 2024 Curtis (’28) and Billie Owens Literary Prizes judge, reads from her work, signs books, and announces student prizewinners April 11 at 7 pm in the Meen Center Brotherton Boardroom. Free and open to the public.

Now Available | 2023 Chapbook & Volume 19

Crocket hawkmoth alight on vertical denim quilt — Fiber art by Sarah Castellon

Katrin Arefy recognized for “Blowing Dandelions”

Congratulations to Katrin Arefy, whose essay in Volume 18 of The Tusculum Review, “Blowing Dandelions,” was honored as a Notable Essay of 2022 in Best American Essays 2023 by Series Editor Robert Atwan.

Her latest theatre work, The Portrait of an Angel, a Lion, a Monster, premiered in Manhattan in January 2022 and was well received by the audience and NY critics in a review on The Theatre Times.

Katrin’s play “A Massacre” was included in the 2023 season of Golden Thread Production’s ReOrient Festival in San Francisco.

See her website for more about Katrin’s work as a playwright and essayist.

2023 Poetry Chapbook Prizewinner | Kelly Gray

Final judge Justin Phillip Reed has selected Kelly Gray’s The Mating Calls of a Specter as the winner of The Tusculum Review 2023 Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Reed praises Gray’s work:

“. . . It’s really the sensual that gets me—some restoration of faith in the body-poem union comes terrifically alive here, not the least due to the presence of damp animals, sharp instruments, bare stomachs, wafts of beer breath, truck exhaust, ‘thin femurs// jagged alps of possum teeth.’ An anxious Frankenwork. I frequently delight in feeling frightened; is that alright? I’m made to ask. Is delight an appropriate response to these images? Should one feel ‘appropriate’ when reading poetry? In a contemporary fog of content over-saturation, I can’t not advocate for cultivating this sort of self-checking trouble as a beacon of worthwhile writing.”

Reed chose Timmy Chong’s East Coast Love Poems for honorable mention:

” . . . I’m more present at than privy to a conversation that is delicious to listen to, like a death metal opera in unfamiliar idiom, a fast bike ride through a district lined by buskers playing sweet somethings. ‘I want to be known like: No, / no… I’ll try again tomorrow’ goes the deceptively straightforward (and agreeable) intro to a poem that then slides into a particle party of my favorite sounds, buzzing like a packet of Nerds candy. The experience leaves me convinced not only of ‘love language’ as more of a literal phenomenon than just a self-help phrase or meme trope, but also of the act of love as a force that transforms and expands how we can speak and, subsequently, how we can think and imagine and conspire.”

2023 Poetry Chapbook Prize submissions end Thursday, June 15

Chosen poet wins $1,000, creation of a limited edition stand-alone chapbook with original artwork, and publication in Volume 19 of The Tusculum Review. Justin Phillip Reed, author of Indecency, The Malevolent Volume, and the forthcoming With Bloom Upon Them and Also With Blood, judges.

The Malevolent Volume by Justin Phillip Reed

Mubanga Kalimamukwento publishes “Pretend” in The Ex-Puritan

Kalimamukwento, winner of the 2022 Tusculum Review Poetry Chapbook Prize for unmarked graves, publishes her first nonfiction, to her sister. “Pretend” is as arresting as her poems. Our publication of her chapbook, with original illustrations by Amiah Brown, has been read across the world.

Hannah Ibibo, Nigerian Student in Minneapolis

Dr Patience Phiri in Solwezi, Zambia

Dorica Banda in Lusaka, Zambia

Vince Gatton, Winner of The Gary Garrison Playwriting Award for 10-Minute Plays (2023)

Gatton’s “The Oktavist” won first place in The Gary Garrison Playwriting Award for 10-Minute Plays.

His play will be performed at Tusculum University for The 5×10 Plays event in the Behan Theatre.

(Read more about Vince under Contest.)

Tusculum University Theatre Presents The 5×10 Plays

Five 10-Minute plays will be performed at Tusculum University in the Behan Theatre. Winner of The Gary Garrison Playwriting Award for 10-Minute Plays Vince Gatton will have his play “The Oktavist” performed along with runner-up Hank Kimmel’s “The End of Summer”.

Hank Kimmel, Runner-Up of The Gary Garrison Playwriting Award for 10-Minute Plays (2023)

Kimmel’s play “The End of Summer” won as runner up in The Gary Garrison Playwriting Award for 10-Minute Plays.

His play will be performed at Tusculum University for The 5×10 Plays event in the Behan Theatre.

(Read more about Hank under Contest.)

Music & Memory

The Tusculum Review hosts the winner of our 2022 Poetry Chapbook Prize, Zambian poet Mubanga Kalimamukwento, for a reading, Q&A, and reception celebrating the publication of her chapbook, unmarked graves. She describes the collection as “conversations with ghosts,” and she contemplates the loss of her closest family members to the AIDS epidemic in Zambia. Copies of the limited edition chapbook will be sold and signed. Original illustrations by artist Amiah Brown.