The Winners of the 2023 Online Contest
Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2023 Online Contest, which was judged by Jackie Ess, Haley Mlotek, and Natalie Shapero. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.
Fiction
Judged by Jackie Ess
Winner: “Personal Reasons” by Silas Jones
Finalists: “ENDLESS FUZZ” by Fatima Jafar
Jackie Ess on the winner: “Captures a moment of change, out of life or between lives. The first person narration is composed and occasionally learned, but simultaneously tends to the matter-of-fact. There is a sense of sleepwalking. The narrator's pains not to be misunderstood and sense of what is allowed or prescribed tends to create an intimacy with the reader, a delicate effect that could easily tip over into smarmy or overfamiliar self-consciousness but doesn't. The unicycle remains upright. Somehow I know everything and nothing about these characters, which is what they know about each other, and somehow enough. Atmospherically I thought of Marguerite Duras's ‘Détruire, dit-elle,’ of the unforgettable beach houses of Beineix's ‘Betty Blue,’ of Ron Carlson's story ‘Oxygen.’ I found myself wishing I could write the author a letter. But perhaps that moment has passed, life already begun. Winner.”
Silas Jones is a writer originally from Seattle, Washington. His fiction has appeared in The Drift, Joyland, and elsewhere. He is Hertog Fellow in fiction at Hunter College in New York City.
Nonfiction
Judged by Haley Mlotek
Winner: “Talking the Fire Out” by Lee Price
Haley Mlotek on the winner: “I’ve chosen ‘Talking The Fire Out’ as my selection for the Online Nonfiction Contest. I so admired the writer’s control over language and syntax, and found their depiction of adolescence in summertime to be both ornate and simple—rich, evocative, and textured sentences that remained succinct and direct, mirroring the balance struck between the the transcendent nature of faith and the base realities of a sunburnt body. The movement between the present and past perfectly captured the way memories become stories.”
Lee Price’s writing has recently appeared in HuffPost, Slate, The Rumpus, and twice in Pigeon Pages. One of Lee’s Pigeon Pages essays was nominated for Best of the Net 2021, and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. Lee is also an attorney by profession, and spent most of their career representing domestic violence survivors in NYC.
Poetry
Judged by Natalie Shapero
Winner: “Materialism” by Bradley Trumpfheller
Natalie Shapero on the winner: "This poem stands out for its captivating sense of the sentence -- the poet has a real command of the weight of fragments, strung together or wrenched apart. The poem moves with satisfying strangeness but also with an unmistakable syntactic logic, alternating moments of order with the unbridled. At once quiet and wild, this piece lines up objects and infuses them with history, energy, light. ‘The opposite of life,’ the poem tells us, ‘is maybe / debt or pastel ownership....’ Fantastic."
Bradley Trumpfheller is a trans writer and the author of a chapbook, RECONSTRUCTIONS (Sibling Rivalry Press). Their work has appeared in Poetry, The Baffler, The Rumpus, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. They have received support from MacDowell, the Michener Center for Writers, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently live in Texas.