Winners of the 2019 ALSCW Meringoff Writing Awards

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2019 ALSCW Meringoff Writing Awards!

Poetry: George David Clark, ‘Song of the Genie,’ ‘The Latch,’ and ‘Northern Lake”; Katie Peterson, “The Web”

George David Clark’s Reveille received the 2015 Miller Williams Prize and his recent poems can be found in AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ecotone, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His work has won awards from such journals as Southern Poetry Review, Narrative Magazine, and Pleiades, and his honors include the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Lily Postdoctoral Fellowship from Valparaiso University, and the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship from Colgate University. The editor of 32 Poems, he teaches creative writing at Washington & Jefferson College and lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and their four young children.

Katie Peterson is the author of four collections of poetry, including A Piece of Good News. Her fifth book, a fable in lyric prose, Life in a Field, will be published by Omnidawn in 2021. Her edition of the New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell came out in 2017. She directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at UC Davis where she is also a Chancellor’s Fellow.

Fiction: Cara Blue Adams, “Desert Light”; JP Gritton, “Wonder Boy”

Cara Blue Adams’s stories appear in magazines including Granta, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Narrative, which named her one of their “15 Below 30.” A 2018-19 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, she has been awarded the Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize and the Missouri Review William Peden Prize in Fiction, along with support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Seton Hall University and lives in Brooklyn.

JP Gritton’s novel Wyoming, a Kirkus best book of 2019, is out with Tin House. His awards include a Cynthia Woods Mitchell fellowship, a DisQuiet fellowship and the Donald Barthelme prize in fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, Greensboro Review, New Ohio Review, Southwest Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the department of English at Duke University.

Non-fiction: William Parker Stoker, “Hemingway’s Dante Revisited: In Our Time and the Mythical Method”

William Parker Stoker is a first-year PhD and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at the University of South Carolina. His research interests include modernism and its antecedents, the life and work of Bram Stoker, and Southern literature, among other things. He received his MA from the George Washington University and his BA from the University of the South.