The Winners of the 2023 Print Contest

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2023 Print Contest, which was judged by Maya Binyam, Andrew Leland, Donna Masini, and Samuel Rutter. 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 Maya Binyam

Winner: Nils, Torrey Paquette

Maya Binyam on the winner: What determines the culture of a family, especially once some of its members decide to step outside of it? “Nils” takes an extraordinary premise (space travel) and suffuses it with the quotidian resentments of distanced kinship. The titular character has just returned to Earth from Jupiter and Saturn, where he’s welcomed home by a network of cousins who work as financial advisors, IT specialists, dental hygienists, white-collar criminals. In Nils’s humility, either false or genuine, the cousins see their unrealized potential. They are preoccupied by the constant, questioning calculus of biological relation: what does he have to do with each of them? The answer is compellingly unclear––and makes for excellent, subtle drama, the kind that makes a mind spiral.

Torrey Paquette is a writer and documentary film producer. His work has appeared in The Drift, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and on PBS. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Neha, and their daughter, Ruhi.

Maya Binyam is the author of Hangman.

Nonfiction

Judged by Andrew Leland

Winner:  “Road Ends in Water,” Chloe Stillwell

Andrew Leland on the winner: “Road Ends in Water” is personal essay as phantasmagoria, conjuring a swirl of images, past and present, real and hallucinated, all of them utterly vivid and arresting. At one point, the writer mocks white people’s urge to trace their feeble strains of native American blood as an ahistorical belief that they’re “kin to some kind of Dances With Wolves fever dream”; the actual native fever dream she paints is far more troubling, and historically grounded, even as pop culture stays in the picture (against all odds, Disney’s Pocahontas is a hero here). As the writer works to disentangle what she dismisses as mere “history” from the power and connection of “heritage” (or what elsewhere she calls, with reverence, “blood memory”), she beautifully illuminates again and again the ways that the generations contain each other: her grandmother alive in her mother, and her mother in herself, with all the complex and entangled pride, madness, and wisdom of that lineage.

Chloe Stillwell is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist and journalist. Her work on politics and culture has appeared in The Daily Beast, The Guardian, Playboy, Slate, Salon, Bust, Paste, and Spin, among others. She attended the New School and currently lives in Nashville.

Andrew Leland is the author of The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (Penguin Press, 2023). His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s Quarterly, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other outlets. From 2013-2019, he hosted and produced The Organist, an arts and culture podcast, for KCRW; he has also produced pieces for Radiolab and 99 Percent Invisible. He has been an editor at The Believer since 2003. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and son.

Poetry

Judged by Donna Masini

Winner: “You Say What Is It I Say An Eyelash,” JC Andrews

Donna Masini on the winner: There’s a nervous energy in this poem despite the seemingly casual, associative meanderings, the meandering syntax and wavering tones. Here are the turns of a curious mind moving among its “stubborn inklings”— backing up, revising itself, reframing, continually surprising in its wit, its leaps, its heart, its unforgettable images, and the shadow of mortality that drives it.

JC Andrews is a poet from Springfield, Arkansas with an interest in poems that work as an un-ing, poems that hold questions as a form of caretaking. Most recently, her work can be found in Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, and Salt Hill.

Donna Masini is the author of three books of poems--4:30 Movie (W.W. Norton and Co., 2018), Turning to Fiction (Norton, 2004), That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994) — and a novel, About Yvonne (Norton,1998). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Five Points. A recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts grants and a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowship residencies at Civitella Ranieri, Bogliasco and Yaddo, she is a Professor of English/Creative Writing at Hunter College, CUNY. She is currently at work on her new collection of poems, In Cahoots.

Translation

Judged by Samuel Rutter

Winner: “Wings of Lead”, Guy Goffette translated by Kathryn Kimball

Samuel Rutter on the winner: In After Lorca, Jack Spicer wrote that a poet is a “time mechanic, not an embalmer.” He was talking about translators and their powers of transmission as well. Embalmers find ways to preserve relics, time mechanics tweak words so literary texts maintain their currency and capacity to “drag the real into the poem.” The English translation of Isabelle Eberhardt’s “Mériéma” is perfectly calibrated to retain the intensity of a visionary prose poem. Is the piece a chronicle or a fictional vignette? The vividness and care with which the landscape and main character are rendered make the question of genre irrelevant. What matters is that we’re persuaded of Mériéma’s eerie presence beyond language, that we see her dancing alone on a dune—a quivering flame, an apparition.    

 Reviewing or critiquing (not to mention judging) the quality of a literary translation is no easy task. In fact, most publications, even the better ones, will quickly dispense with the fact of translation with a brisk nod to the translator before returning to address the book in question as if it had been written in English the whole time. I’d guess that more often than not, this is due to a combination of the linguistic capabilities of the reviewer and the question of readership: are reviews for people deciding if they want to buy a book or not, or for polyglot bibliophiles assessing the accuracy of a translation? I’d like to put forward two ideas here that guided my approach to selecting a winner for the Columbia Journal’s Translation Contest. Firstly, it is absolutely possible to assess the quality of writing in translation, even without knowing the source language, and secondly, that a good translation does more than “correctly” ferry words from one language to another: there is also the question of style. 

All three finalists in this year’s contest captured and conveyed a style that is evocative, consistent, and, yes, accurate. 

Guy Goffette, born on the French/Belgian in 1947, was a poet, writer, and editor at Gallimard. He lived in Paris and published over thirty books (poetry, novels, and essays). His work was translated into over 25 languages. He won numerous prizes, including the Prix Goncourt and the Grand prix de poésie de l’Académie française.

Kathryn Kimball grew up in Alabama, has a Ph.D. in English, and has taught nineteenth-century literature. Her publications include a 2021 chapbook and a book of poetry to appear in 2025. Many poems and translations of hers have been published on-line. She is a yoga practitioner and lives in New York City.

Samuel Rutter is a writer and translator from Melbourne, Australia. Formerly the deputy editor of Astra Magazine, his work can be found in Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and The Telegraph, and he is a regular contributor to T, The New York Times Style Magazine.