The Winners of the 2024 Online Contest

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2024 Online Contest, which was judged by Jonas Eika, Jeanna Kadlec, Megan Fernandes, and Mónica de la Torre. 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 Jonas Eika

Winner: “Circulation Line” by Jisoo Hope Yoon

Jonas Eika on the winner: Tight and conceptual in its composition, yet supple and elastic in style, this year’s winner is an overwhelmingly original piece. It presents us with a dreamlike world, but told in a language so clear and confident that we have to accept is as real—and from within that world it makes us look with fresh eyes on things like coupledom, language barriers and those late twenties that are said to lead to some kind of adulthood. In just ten pages, this story manages to create an atmosphere of eternal transit, as specific and matter-of-fact as its great first sentence: “In the dark I dream only of bottomless mimosas.”

Jisoo Hope Yoon is a writer, translator, and theater-maker from Seoul, South Korea. She is excited about language, lay conversations about physics, and stories of women making their lives their own. Her first novel is in development with support from Stanford University. 

Finalist: “Brine” by Connor White

Jonas Eika on the finalist: The elegance and tender, psychological flair of this one made it a very strong candidate for the winner. Through its clear, beautiful, subtly vibrating sentences it makes room for a small, but very real drama that unfolds almost in real-time, creeping up in the periphery as we read. With its convincing portrait and its attentive ear for gendered sociolect, I think this story tells us something important about protective masculinity as a push and pull-dynamic of control and anxiousness – also by letting those two forces seep into its syntax. 

Connor White is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. He has taught writing at the University of Iowa, The Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and at the University of Tennessee. His work has appeared in The Southern Humanities Review, Monkey Bicycle, Postscript Magazine, Clarion Magazine, The Des Moines Register, Guesthouse, Flyover Country Magazine, and Aurealis Magazine. His work has received support at the Key West Literary Workshop, and in the summer of 2023 he was a Visiting Artist and Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. He is currently at work on a novel and a story collection.

Nonfiction

Judged by Jeanna Kadlec

Winner: “Asian Koel” by Clement Yue

Jeanna Kadlec on the winner: Propulsive, lyrical, and emotionally moving, "The Asian Koel" is an essay you simply have to finish reading in order to be satisfied. It vibrates with a kind of velocity and tension that is rare in short-form. This is largely due to the author's striking choices of using present tense as well as integrating, rather than braiding, the different story strands—we flit between bird facts and the death of loved ones like a hummingbird between flowers. These innovative formal choices tightly carry the reader through a thoughtful, empathetic representation of grief and loss. 

Clement Yue is an essayist from Singapore. He explores family, queerness, religion, and the general strangeness of growing up in Singapore. His essays have been published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and The Slow Press. He currently resides in Brooklyn with a beat-up rice cooker and is an avid petter of cats. His favorite breed of cat is orange.

Poetry

Judged by Megan Fernandes

Winner: “Half-Brother (Letter to Eli)” by Luci Arbus-Scandiffio 

Megan Fernandes on the winner: A deadpan, beautifully declarative-lined poem. Written with equal wildness and control, abandon and authority, and accompanied by dogs, boats, and seashells you can't drop, the poet writes with a mutual sense of irony and reverence.

Luci Arbus-Scandiffio is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Bennington Review, Greensboro Review, and Copenhagen. Luci has two lesbian moms, and is originally from New Jersey.

Finalist: “Ode to Finales” by Kiersten Czuwala

Megan Fernandes on the finalist: The pacing, the unfolding, the flow of these lines is so ecstatic and suspenseful. The poet writes into the ephemeral "slipstream of moonlight" and missed confessions. A stunning poem, masterfully executed across the page and time. 

Kiersten Czuwala is a writer and yoga teacher based in upstate New York. Informed by the yoga practice, much of her work involves the exploration of both the physical and spiritual body. Her work has previously appeared in Same Faces Collective and is forthcoming in Samfiftyfour.

Translation

Judged by Mónica de la Torre

Winner: “Mériéma” by Isabelle Eberhardt, translated by Donald Mason

Mónica de la Torre 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.    

Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), the daughter of a Russian anarchist, spent much of her brief life travelling and writing in North Africa. An arabized European dressing as an Arab boy, Eberhardt was killed in a flash flood at Aïn-Sefra, near the Algerian-Moroccan border, in 1904. She was twenty-seven years old. 

Donald Mason has published translations in Brick, Alchemy, and The Antigonish Review. He has also edited four popular anthologies for Penguin Canada. He is currently working on a proposed collection of translated stories by Isabelle Eberhardt, entitled Daughters of the Casbah.