The ALSCW is very pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Meringoff Prizes in Fiction and Poetry. The co-winners in Fiction this year are Brian Buchanan for his story, “Wisdom Teeth,” and David Galef for his story, “Therapy.” The judge of the Fiction Prize was Brad Leithauser.
This year’s co-winners in Poetry are Brendan Rabon for his poem, “Gladstone,” and Daniel Tobin for “This Broken Symmetry.” Rachel Hadas judged the Poetry competition.
Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to all the participants and judges!
Brian J. Buchanan is a writer in Nashville, Tenn. He holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Indiana University, and a master’s in English literature from the State University of New York at Brockport. His reviews, essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in the Nashville Tennessean, Crannog, Literary Matters, Modern Age, Cumberland River Review, Potomac Review and elsewhere.
David Galef has published over a dozen books in two dozen directions, including the novel How to Cope with Suburban Stress, the short story collection My Date with Neanderthal Woman, and the poetry collection Kanji Poems. His latest volume is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook, from Columbia University Press. He is a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University.
Brendan Rabon holds a B.A. in Classics from New College of Florida and an M.A. in Classical Languages from the University of Georgia. He lives in Athens, Georgia.
Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, most recently From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and the forthcoming Blood Labors. He is author of the critical studies Awake in America, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, and On Serious Earth, forthcoming in 2019. Tobin is also editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Arts (with Pimone Triplett) and The Collected Early Poems of Lola Ridge. His poetry has won the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors.