Michael Martone has selected “29 Pieces from the Lost Book of Hawkwoman,” by Kevin Heath and Ryan Futrell, as this year’s winner of the 2009 Tusculum Review Prize for fiction. “An excellent mash-up of both high and low culture,” said Martone of the winning piece, “a ragged collage within a collage. It combines raptor and rapper in a fiction amalgam all right, all rapture riding thermals of language and image, contrasting the mundane with the soaring, the boring with sudden surprise.”
Of the finalists, Martone remarked, “I liked ‘29 Pieces from the Lost Book of Hawkwoman’ and all the finalists very much. All were ambitious, ripped, and seemingly ready for anything.”
The winning entry receives $1,000 and publication in The Tusculum Review vol. 5/2009, due out in May.
2009 Tusculum Review Prize for Fiction Winner
“29 Pieces from the Lost Book of Hawkwoman”
by Kevin Heath of Cedarville, Ohio, and Ryan Futrell of Xenia, Ohio
2009 Tusculum Review Prize for Fiction Finalists
“Parrots and Slugs”
by Caren Beilin of Missoula, Montana
“The Well of Yang Village”
by Astrid Duffy of Tucson, Arizona
“The Battle Cry of Vernon Stephens”
by Michael Gutierrez of Miami, Florida
“The Giant of Bandy Hill”
by Gregory Kirmser of Bronx, New York
The editors wish to thank the many who submitted fiction to this year’s contest. Next year, we will be running a poetry contest. Check our website over the summer for guidelines and information regarding next year’s judge.
Michael Martone is Professor of English at the University of Alabama–Tuscaloosa. He is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Blue Guide to Indiana and Michael Martone, two collections of fiction, The Flatness and Other Landscapes and Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art, and six edited volumes. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he and his wife, Poet Theresa Pappas, edit Stone County Books.
Martone, who was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, attended Butler University, Indiana University and John Hopkins University. At John Hopkins, he studied with John Barth. He has previously taught at Iowa State, Harvard, and Syracuse.
The recipient of an Ingram Merrill Foundation Grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize, Martone has served as editors for such anthologies as The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists, A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest, and Townships: Pieces of the Midwest.