The Winners of the 2022 Print Contest
Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2022 Print Contest, which was judged by Jonathan Escoffery, Qian Julie Wang, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Valzhyna Mort. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our four wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.
Fiction
Judged by Jonathan Escoffery
Winner: “Rowen Sedans Never Answers Me” by Sarah Lotfi
Finalists: “Devil in the Village” by Subraj Singh, “Ask the Sea” by Khanh Ha, “Post Bombs” by Amelia Granger
Jonathan Escoffery on the winner: “Told in energetic, rhythmic prose, an alternate title for ‘Rowen Sedans Never Answers Me’ might have been ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman Experiencing Psychosis.’ It’s a surrealist portrayal of a film school dropout who is both critical of the art school culture she has exited and haunted by the influences that were forced upon her while in attendance. The story smartly asks, is the artist chasing her influences or are her influences chasing her. It’s a joyful reading experience and one gets the sense there was joy in the writing of the story. The surrealist mode is bolstered by the narrator’s emotional intensity and by a good deal of wit and observational humor. I was impressed by the finely tuned rendering of the narrator’s desire for artistic validation, balanced against her critique of performative artist personas. I also appreciate that the story doesn’t lose sight of the ways money often dictates who gets to come away with a degree in art. The voice, for me, cinched it. Where, at times, I wondered, Is this really happening? I never wondered, Is this vital?”
Sarah Lotfi is a writer from Montreal, Quebec. A short story of hers appears in vol. 11 of The Ocean State Review. She is a double Virgo.
Nonfiction
Judged by Qian Julie Wang
Winner: “One and Done” by Noah Rosenzweig
Finalists: “Cleavage” by Aditi Rao, “American Boy” by James McSherry, “The Orange Drop” by Rosa Mesbahi
Qian Julie Wang on the winner: “Intimate and vulnerable, ‘One and Done’ puts readers into the body of someone who undergoes top surgery and scar revision—with all the attendant nuance, doubt, and joy. It is a rare feat to chart and capture an emotional transformation through a physical one, and this piece accomplishes it in the rawest and most powerful sense. To read the spare prose here is to be transported and moved. ‘One and Done’ is a work I will not soon forget.”
Noah Grey Rosenzweig grew up in New Jersey (home of the best bagels) before moving to D.C. with his beloved sidekick, Pilot Jones. He is the editorial fellow for Roxane Gay Books and a literary agent at Triangle House Literary. His pronouns are he/they.
Poetry
Judged by Diana Khoi Nguyen
Winner: “Stranger Daughter” by Rachel Mikita
Diana Khoi Nguyen on the winner: “The poem begins with the lament of a child, and in it we are thrown into an abduction, homage, and longing for all things maternal: homeland, water, the long line of ‘ancestors laid out on the table.’ The everyday objects of domestic life merge with mundane sites of the body: dirt under fingernails, sweat between breasts, stomach bile juxtaposed in baptismal waters. The body is a site of rupture from one’s birthing parent, from a land in which one sprouted and from which one was snatched—like a head of cabbage sliced from its roots, a potato plucked from the soil. These displaced hands may hold nothing, but one’s parent is everywhere inside the body.”
Rachel Mikita is a poet and writer from Blacklick, PA, and Flint, TX. She is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in The Coal Hill Review. She currently lives in Brooklyn.
Translation
Judged by Valzhyna Mort
Winner: “How it must hurt to blossom!” by Nawal Al Ali, translated by Raphael Amahl Khouri
Valzhyna Mort on the winner: “In the beginning there was chaos, then Nawal Al Ali created sadness. She made a human out of spit wrapped in tissue paper, pitied flowers for ‘it must hurt to blossom!’, looked into the frightened eye of a rhinoceros, and, on the sixth day, composed a book in which every word was an ant.
I felt startled by the freshness of the voice Raphael Amahl Khouri’s translation brought to me from Arabic into English. I felt awakened by his skillful tone that blends colloquial and ceremonial. He crafted a myth-maker poet, playful, sensual, and melancholic, with a mind that brings together a world: from a home kitchen and a sewage ditch to a kitchen and a graveyard in Copenhagen, via a Portuguese beach and a few museum stops to look at art. Nawal Al Ali closes her poem with an intimate letter to Inger Christensen, in which, praising Nerval’s translation of Goethe, she exclaims ‘he translated love, not language!’ In this final fragment, all the themes of her hybrid text come together: lyric, real and surreal, loss, love, distorted words, translation, depression, the mortal self and the immortal art.
‘He translated love, not language!’ Nawal Al Ali, together with Raphael Amahl Khouri, translated sadness into irony, then they translated irony into lyric, then they translated lyric into hybrid.”
Raphael Amahl Khouri is a transgender Jordanian writer of documentary plays and poetry, living in Berlin. Khouri is the author of several plays, including the first transgender Arab play, She He Me, staged at Kosmos Theatre in Vienna in 2019, and No Matter Where I Go, a documentary play about Lebanese queer women and non-binary people, staged in Beirut in 2014. His work has been published in several US journals and international anthologies.
Nawal Al Ali is a writer, a translator and a journalist. She is the author of an Arabic language book, Biography of the Sleeper (2006), several plays, as well as many research papers on feminism. She is also the translator of Mark Fisher’s Postcapitalist Desire, and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility into Arabic.
