A competitive talent search open to all writing in English, the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition is for previously unpublished work. Entries are accepted in seven categories: Novel, Novella, Novel-in-Progress, Short Story, Essay, Poetry, and Short Story by a High School Student. Overall goals of the competition are to seek out new, talented writers and assist them in finding literary agents and, ultimately, publishers for their work.

The 2011 competition's opening date was January 1, 2011. The competition closed on May 15.

2011 winners were formally presented at the annual meeting of the Faulkner Society, Faulkner for All! during Words & Music, a Literary Feast in New Orleans, November 9 - 13. The annual gala was held this year on Friday, the 11th Day of the 11th month, November, in the year 2011, an auspicious date for the annual meeting! Their work will be published in the 2012 edition of The Double Dealer. We are doing final editing and formatting of the 2011 edition and expect now to go live with the 2011 on-line journal soon. That issue will contain the work of 2010 winners and runners-up who submitted their work to us for publication.The Double Dealer has not has not been published since 2007, the edition which featured the work of 2006 winners. Once we have published our 2011 ediition, we will begin posting 2007-2009 winners.The 2012 edition will be published concurrent with
Words & Music, 2012.

We began accepting entries for the 2012 competition on January 1, 2012. The deadline for 2012 will be May 1. For information on the 2012 competition, including cateories, prizes, and guidelines,CLICK HERE! For an entry form for the 2012 competition, CLICK HERE!

Significant cash prizes are offered for previously unpublished works in seven categories: Novel, $7,500; Novella, $2,500; Novel-in-Progress, $2,000; Short Story, $1,500; Essay, $1,000; Poetry, $750; and Short Story by a High School Student, $750, winner; $250, sponsoring teacher. Winners also receive gold medals and are the Faulkner Society's guests for Words & Music, 2011.

The costs related to competition winners and the gala at which they are presented total approximately $30,000 annually.

The 2011 winners and finalists will remain in our accessible on-line archives.

Novel

In the novel category, the Society received 292 entries. This means that those who placed in the semi-finalist category were in the top 50 per cent of entries in the category; those who place on the long list for novel select were in the top 35 per cent; those on the she short list placed in the top 15 per cent. We had an extraordinary number of novel entries this year whichdeserve publication with editorial tweaking. The novels selected as finalists are all quite different in subject matter and approach. Two are historical novels, one is about love, another is about aging and family, another is about an urban crime and vulnerability, another is about the disappearing core of American life, small towns, and the unique characters of Small Town, America. Each author has taken an an imaginative approach to the subject matter and created characters to whom the reader is drawn.

The finalists were judged by Random House editor Will Murphy, who had this to say about the winner he selected.

Water Master is an engaging, plucky, and taught piece of work by a writer who is clearly in command of his work.

WINNER
The Water Master by Peter Selgin, Winter Park, FL and New York City, NY

Peter Selgin is the author of Drowning Lessons, winner of the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2008). He is also the author of a previous novel, Life Goes to the Movies (Dzanc Books, 2009; second prize, AWP Award for the Novel; second prize James Jones First Novel Award, and two books on the craft of writing, By Cunning & Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers and 179 Ways to Save a Novel: Matters of Vital Concern to Fiction Writers (2006, 2010, Writers Digest Books). His memoir, Landscape with English Teacher, was finalist for both the Bakeless and the Graywolf Press Prizes for Creative Nonfiction and his memoir in essays, Confessions of a Left-Handed Man, was just published by the University of Iowa Press. A painter and illustrator as well as writer, his art has appeared in The New Yorker, Forbes, Gourmet, Outside, and other publications. He also has written several books for children, including S.S. Gigantic Across the Atlantic (Simon & Schuster, 1999), winner of the Helen Lemme Award for Best Children’s Picture Book of 1999. As a playwright he has won national awards, including the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference Award for A God in the House, a drama based on Dr. Jack Kevorkian.. His stories and essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including Salon, The Sun, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, Chicago Tribune, Missouri Review, Colorado Review, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review, as well as in the anthologies Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2003), Writers and Their Notebooks (University of South Carolina Press, 2010), Their Roots are Deep with Passion (Other Press, 2006), and Best American Essays, 2006. He is the editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food. He lives in New York City and in Winter Park, FL, where he is Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Rollins College.
  
Equal Runners-up:
Bad of Country by Tadzio Koelb of New York, NY

Tadzio Koelb is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Master’s program in creative writing. His fiction has appeared in The Madison Review and Ozone Park Journal, and he has been awarded writing residencies at Yaddo, Caldera Arts, Jentel, and NY Mills and was Artist-in-Residence at the City of Brussels’ Maison D’Art Actuel des Chartreux. Tadzio regularly reviews art and fiction for a number of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement.

Echoes of Love and War by Joyce Miller of Cincinnati, OH

Joyce Miller holds a Master of Italian studies from the Ohio State University and is currently teaching Italian at the University of Cincinnati. She is assistant editor to the Cincinnati Review, the literary journal of the University of Cincinnati’s English department. She has written two books about off-beat fun and food joints in Cincinnati: Diving Out and Diving Deeper. Her short story Barn Lesson appeared in Ohio Voices.



Will Murphy had these remarks about the runners-up he selected:

Both manuscripts contain real and sometimes startling brilliance—no question—and both writers are marvelously talented. These are works of real quality, showing great promise.

JUDGE
Will Murphy is an Executive Editor at Random House, where he has worked for six years. Previously, he was a senior editor at the University of Minnesota Press, and the literary editor at the University of California Press in Berkeley. Will was recently was named one of "50 Under 40," who matter in publishing by Publishers Weekly. Murphy has become known for editing books that matter, such as the powerful Finn by Jon Clinch and the beautiful work by Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence; as well as The Second World: Enemies and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna. Also on his list are How Success Happens by David Brooks and The Battle of the Crater by Richard Slotkin. Other authors include include Jeff Shaara, David Brooks, Bernard-Henri Levy, Philip Zimbardo, and Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, which was on the New York Times Bestseller List for 16 weeks.

OTHER FINALISTS
All in a Name, Lawrence Wells, Oxford, MS
Continuities, Garic Barranger, Covington, LA
F-Train, Richard Weber and Elizabeth Dottorir-Thompson, Geneva, Switzerland

For others who placed in the novel category, Click Here!

Novella

The Society received 123 entries, fewer than average years. Preliminary round judges
commented that many of those rejected as finalists were too long and unwieldy for the novella format and recommended that the authors consider streamlining the story line and that they either drastically edit for length or rewrite as a novel. The final judge last year, National Book Award winner Julia Glass, made the same comment about some finalists last year and in response to her comments the Socity reduced the maximum allowable words. The 2011 judge for the novella category was author Elise Blackwell, who had this to say about the winner:

After Freddie Left is a portrait of aftermath, though an aftermath of what is something neither the central character nor the reader initially understands. This novella offers real insight into human nature, particularly in its understanding of how our motivations, reactions, and impulses often remain mysterious to us, stemming as they often do not from our rationality but our subconscious minds. The Marigny setting is neither accidental nor overdone; this story could be set nowhere else.

WINNER:
After Freddie Left by Chris Waddington of New Orleans, LA

Chris Waddington of New Orleans writes about music and dance for The Times-Picayune. Notable magazine editors have published Waddington’s fiction for more than a decade. Gordon Lish chose two pieces for The Quarterly. Andrei Codrescu ran short-shorts in Exquisite Corpse. Dawn Raffel picked his work for the New York-based online journal Guernica. John Biguenet published a story in New Orleans Review. Waddington’s stories also ran in The Rake, a Minneapolis city magazine, where they appeared alongside fiction by Ron Carlson, Stuart Dybek and other established talents. Agent Ben Camardi of the Harold Matson Company represents Waddington’s story collection, A Rope Trick. The collection includes two novellas, both set in New Orleans —where Waddington lives with his wife and three-year-old son. After Freddie Left is one of the two novellas in the collection. Waddington served as books editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune for five years. His writing about visual art has appeared in the Oxford American, Art and Antiques, Art in America, and also in The Times-Picayune, where he worked as a staff critic in the mid-1990s.

FIRST RUNNER-UP:
O Fortuna by Paul Negri of Clifton, NJ

Paul Negri is the former president and publisher of Dover Publications, Inc.and is a 40-year veteran of the book publishing business. He is the editor of more than a dozen literary anthologies of short stories and poetry published by Dover, including Great American Short Stories, Great Short Short Stories, Civil War Poetry and English Victorian Poetry. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, he is a graduate of Long Island University with an M.A. in English. His novellas The Virginal Grip and The Waiter’s Tale were short-listed for the finals in the 2011 and 2010 Faulkner – Wisdom competitions. He currently is completing his second collection of short stories.

Elise Blackwell had this to say about the First
Runner-up:

O Fortuna is a smartly written look at how people’s lives are defined both by pattern and by luck. Like many of the poems in the Carmina Burana, which contains the original O Fortuna,  this novella also satirizes social authority. Contemporary definitions of novella often depend solely on length, but this tale’s structure, use of sharp humor, and authoritative delivery of plot suggest the form’s longer history. (If someone had told me I would be selecting a story in which a main character gets hit by a bus, I would never have believed it, but here it is.)

SECOND RUNNER-UP:
Newcomers by Chris Waddington, New Orleans, LA
Elise Blackwell had this to say about the Second Runner-up, whose author is also
winner of the novella competition for 2011:

In darkly comic Newcomers, a couple’s fear of—and fascination with—violent crime becomes the arena in which they act out the destruction of their marriage. The prose, particularly its frequent use of repetition with variation, gives force and unexpected depth to the satire of a social stratum. I believe it was William Gass who said that criticisms of Moby Dick diminish his opinion not of the novel but of the speaker. In this novella, the understanding of New Orleans reached by these newcomers indicts not the Crescent City but the characters.

JUDGE:
Elise Blackwell is the author of the novels
The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, Hunger,
and Grub. Her newest novel, published in 2010, is An Unfinished Score, which revolves around classical music and performing artists. Her books have been selected for numerous "best of the year" lists, including the
Los Angeles Times, Sydney Morning Herald, and Kirkus. Her short stories and criticism have appeared in Witness,Topic, Seed, Global City Review, and Quick Fiction.
A native of Louisiana and a graduate of LSU,
Elise lives in Columbia, S. C., where she is director of the MFA/CreativeWriting Program at the University of South Carolina, one of the best MFA programs in the country.
For more on Elise and here work, Click Here!

OTHER FINALISTS:
A Madman in the House, Vicki Salloum, New Orleans, LA
Beehive, Adam Sturtevant, Brooklyn, NY
Davi-Kahn, Nick Krait, Chicago, IL
Diary of a Darling, Wendy Ralph, Columbia, SC
Ithaka, Joe Dwyer, Sacramento, CA
Life on Hold, Virginia Tell, Baton Rouge, LA
Love in Foreign Lands, Julie Rold, Boston, MA
Masters of Demise, Mary Frances, Las Cruces, NM
Millburn, Peter Orr, New Orleans, LA
Sisters, Diana Shamoon, Remsenberg, NY
The Mighty Cook Lafitte, Johnny Goldstein, St. Louis, MO
Virtual Girlfriend, Michael Alexander Wynne, Hove, East Sussex, UK

For others who placed in the novella category, Click Here!

Novel-in-Progress

As with the novel category, we have a treasure trove of riches in the Novel-in-Progress
category. We received 268 entries and these entries included more manuscripts which come close to our "Ready for Publication" standard. The 2011 Novel-in-Progress category was judged by literary agent Jeff Kleinman, who had this to say about how he judges generally:

When I judge contests, it’s an occupational hazard that I read them through the filter of a literary agent’s eyes – so I first review the novel’s premise (is it original? Interesting? Fresh?), and then the writing itself (how compelling is the voice? How strong and assured are the author’s abilities? and so forth).  The novels I’ve chosen here were all intriguing and well-written.

And this to say about the winning manuscript:

White Flies is a haunting narrative about rape and betrayal. This novel exhibited an extraordinary assurance of voice and compelling, urgent, unforgettable writing

Winner:
Whiteflies, M. O. Walsh, Baton Rouge, LA

M.O. Walsh is a writer from Baton Rouge, LA. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, Epoch and American Short Fiction, among others. His work also hasbeen anthologized in Best New American Voices, Best of the Net, Louisiana in Words, and Bar Stories.

His first book, a short story collection, The Prospect of Magic, won the Tartt’s First Fiction Prize, was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction, and was an Editor’s Pick for Best Book of 2010 by Oxford American. He currently teaches for The Creative Writing Workshop at The University of New Orleans where he also serves as Fiction Editor for the literary journal Bayou. He has a wife named Sarah, a daughter named Magnolia, a dog named Gus, and is happy.

First Runner-Up:
Falling, C.A. Willis, Burien, WA

C.A. (Cindy Ann) Willis was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in publications including Seattle, Aboard, Northwest Travel, The Rozella Review, Transitions Abroad, Mature Living, Northwest Ink, The Ark, and Best New Poems. Her first novel, The Long Thirst, won the prestigious Zola Award at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. She has also received second place for overall fiction, Kay Snow Award, and been a double semi-finalist for the Faulkner-Wisdom competition. During a year of backpacking around the world, she traveled  extensively on the plains of Northern
India—a trip that inspired her first novel. Her second novel, A Fictional Life, was
completed in a remote yurt in Alaska. Her current novel-in-progress, Falling, First Runner-up for this year’s Faulkner-Wisdom Novel-in-Progress Gold Medal, was spawned by her job as a flight attendant. It is the story of a woman who literally falls from the sky. C. A. Willis lives in Seattle, WA.

Jeff Kleinman had this to say about Falling:
Falling is a truly unique premise married with very strong writing.  I was very impressed.

EQUAL SECOND RUNNERS-UP

Hannah Delivered, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, Minneapolis, MN

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is the author of Swinging on the Garden Gate, Writing the Sacred Journey:  The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir, and On the Threshold:  Home, Hardwood, and Holiness, a collection of personal essays.  She teaches creative nonfiction at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, MN.  Her website is www.spiritualmemoir.com.

Jeff Kleinman had this to say about her entry:

Sometimes voice and character really stop me in my tracks – that’s what happened here.  Terrific voice, interesting character – well done.

The Sound of Falling Darkness, Lyn Di lorio, New York, NY

Lyn Di Iorio is half-Puerto Rican, was born in Brooklyn and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  Some of the island’s issues—such as its quasi-colonial status and its relationship to Afro-Caribbean culture—lie at the core of her current work, which on its surface presents as satirical mystery fiction.  Her first novel Outside the Bones, is a 2011 release from Arte Público Press (University of Houston). A review in Mystery Scene says: “Lyn Di Iorio’s first novel is a weirdly compelling, funny, sexy and deeply strange tale of a Nuyorican practitioner of Palo Monte, a Caribbean form of magic with African roots.  [Lyn Di Iorio] has taken the crime story to a strange and mysterious new place.”  Prior to Outside the Bones, Lyn published scholarly work on Latino literature, notably a book called Killing Spanish, and wrote short stories. Lyn is a professor in the English departments of The City College of New York and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  She has a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University, and a bachelor of arts from Harvard University.

The author has created a fascinating character in Lucy Storer, who is a very unexpected serial killer – bright, funny, and unique.  Her story is compelling and unusual.

The Invention of Violet, Amy Boutell, Santa Barbara, CA

Amy Boutell’s novel-in-progress has received recognition from the Ragdale Foundation and the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Post Road, Nimrod, New Letters, and Other Voices. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers and works as an instructor at the Writing Lab at UCSB.

Jeff Kleinman had this to say about her essay entry:

I never knew vintage clothing could be so fascinating.  Once this novel is finished and polished, it’s definitely going to be something to be on the lookout for.


JUDGE:
Jeff Kleinman is a literary agent, intellectual property attorney, and founding partner of Folio Literary Management, LLC, a New York literary agency which works with all of the major U.S. publishers (and, through subagents) with most international publishers.  He’s a graduate of Case Western Reserve University (J.D.), the University of Chicago (M.A., Italian), and the University of Virginia (B.A. with High Distinction in English).  As an agent, Jeff feels privileged to have the chance to learn an incredibly variety of new subjects, meet an extraordinary range of people, and feel, at the end of the day, that he’s helped to build something – a wonderful book, perhaps, or an author’s career.  His authors include Garth Stein, Robert Hicks, Charles Shields, Bruce Watson, Dean Faulkner Wells, Neil White, and Philip Gerard. Nonfiction: especially narrative nonfiction with a historical bent, but also memoir, health, parenting, aging, nature, pets, how-to, nature, science, politics, military, espionage, equestrian, biography. Fiction: very well-written, character-driven novels; some suspense, thrillers; otherwise mainstream commercial and literary fiction.  No: children’s, romance, mysteries, westerns, poetry, or screenplays, novels about serial killers, suicide, or children in peril (kidnapped, killed, raped, etc.).

OTHER FINALISTS

African Son, Peter Tattersall, New Orleans, LA
Bailout, Kate Bullard Adams, Charleston, SC
Bondage, John Malone, Lafayette, LA
Caught in the Storm, Mary Culverson, Covington, LA
Darwin, William Coles, Salt Lake City, UT
Discipline the Devil's Country, Mike Ditchfield, Edgartown, MA
Family Matters, Perry Glasser, Haverhill, MA
How to Make Moonshine, Jana Cromartie Sasser, Edisto Island, SC
Judah P, Scott Sullivan, New Orleans, LA
Lincoln on the Water, Emily Wheatley Pease, Williamsburg, VA
Matter of Midwinter, Elizabeth Haraldsdottir-Thomas, Carouge, Switzerland
Men of The Earth, Timothy Jay Smith, Paris, France
One Good Mamma Bone, Brenda McClain, Nashville, TN
Shanghai Snag, Ken Mask, Lafayette, LA
Tears of the Foot Guard, Tim Osner, Melvin Village, NH
The Amazing Life and Loves of Billy Joe Roe, Elizabeth Haraldsdottir-Thomas, Carouge, Switzerland
The Missionary’s Wife, Caroline Kellems, Guatemala City, Guatelmala
The Principles of Mining, Sharon Thatcher, Boise, ID, & Wayland Stallard, Roanoke,VA
This is Squalorville, Brian Schneider, St. Helen, MI
The Thread, Thomas J.Greer, Jr., Avon, IN
Waiting for Something Else, Martin Cloutier, Brooklyn, NY

For others who placed in the novel-in-progress category, Click Here!

Short Story

The 2011 short story competition attracted entries from every state in the union and three foreign countries. Harper Collins editor Michael Signorelli judged the short story entries for 201ll and had this to say about the winning manuscript:

A Bellyful of Sparrow balances the horror of life with the humor. The mute, immobile, terminally ill narrator wryly observes the life around him, while also inspiring unexpected attention from friends and family. But what could be a dirge is instead quietly mirthful. The story upends expectation and strikes for the elusive territory between bemusement and solemnity. And carried by the strength of its naturally engaging prose-voice, it succeeds.

Winner:
A Belly Full of Sparrow, Terri Stoor, New Orleans, LA

Terri Stoor, winner of the 2011 William Faulkner-William Wisdom gold medal for the short story, is a founding member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance, the New Orleans Chapter of the Words & Music Writers Alliance. This past summer she was invited to and attended the inaugural Oxford American Summit for Ambitious Writers. Terri is also the second runner-up in the essay category of the 2011 Faulkner-Wisdom awards for Bird Dog, and placed a short story on the short list for finalists in the 2010 Faulkner-Wisdom awards. A former actor and comedian, she lives in French Quarter of New Orleans, where she is working on a collection of short stories and teaching her Labrador retriever to smile on command. Terri read her winning work the annual meeting of the Writers Alliance during Words & Music, 2011.

First Runner-Up:
The Pancho Villa Coin, Marylee MacDonald, Tempe, AZ

Marylee MacDonald, a former carpenter with a Masters in Creative Writing from San Francisco State, lives in Arizona. She has published in American Literary Review, New Delta Review, The Briar Cliff Review, North Atlantic Review, The Bellevue Literary Review, River Oak Review, Story Quarterly, Raven Chronicles, Ruminate, Four Quarters, and the Blue Moon Literary & Art Review. Her 2011 winning short story, The Pancho Villa Coin, won the Barry Hannah Prize from The Yalobusha Review in January, 2012. William Gay judged the contest. Another of her short stories, Tea and Sugar, won the Rash Award from Broad River Review, also announced in January, 2012. The contest was judged by Silas House. Her short story, Almost Paradise, won the 2009 Matt Clark Prize competition. Finding Peter won the American Literary Review 2010 Fiction Prize. Her novel, Unpaid Labor, about mothers who would do anything to keep fate from harming their children, was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. Her sort story Break was a runner-up in the 2010 Faulkner - Wisdom competition.

Michael Signorelli had this to say about Marylee's entry:

The Pancho Villa Coin is an absorbing and troubling read. A young girl, exploring both interior and exterior landscapes, struggles, alongside her mother, to love and survive her explosively alcoholic father. The story manages to soak the reader in a pleasingly foreign atmosphere while building a feeling of threat.

Second Runner-up:
The Summer of My Faith, Will Thrift, Columbia, SC

A graduate of the University of South Carolina, William Thrift has traveled extensively in the US and abroad. After serving many years as a corporate regional manager for a private business, his creative side has emerged. In addition to writing a novel and producing short fiction, he is a contributing writer for Columbia Home & Garden magazine. Spare time consists of songwriting, dabbling in creative cuisine, and serving as Vice President for the Historic Cottontown Neighborhood in Columbia, SC.

The judge had this to say about Will's entry:

The Summer of My Faith is a sweet story that captures an in-between time in a boy’s life. The wide-open freedom of summer is dampened by the equally engulfing depths of boredom. But out of the quiet comes a soul-opening moment.

JUDGE:

Michael Signorelli has been at HarperCollins Publishers since 2005.  His list ranges widely from poetry and stories to novels and memoirs to graphic novels and design.  He edits New York Times bestselling authors Kenneth C. Davis and Thomas C. Foster; internationally acclaimed  novelists Dennis Cooper, Richard Milward, and Tony O’Neill; memoirists Dan White, Kevin Sampsell, and Gerry Hadden, and Barnes & Noble Discover Finalist (and New Orleans’ own) Barb Johnson, among others. Recent books of note include Three Delays by Charlie Smith; Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor, and The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Susan Harris. He created and wrote HarperCollins’s poetry blog www.cruelestmonth.com and helps manage HarperPerennial’s blog www.olivereader.com. Michael’s keen for fearless yet disciplined début fiction and for culturally significant non-fiction by experts in their field. He graduated from Hamilton College and lives in New York City.

OTHER FINALISTS:

Angel, Lynn Strauss, Chicago, IL
Assisted Living, James Harmon,Decatur, GA
Beth Bird's Chocolate Cakes, etc...., Rebecca Dhillon-Michell, New York, NY
Death Without Benefits, Wendy Simmons, Stevensville  MI
Hapless Harvey, Mary Kuykendall-Weber, Middle Grove, NY
History of a Torrid Relationship, Owen Goodwyne, Tallahassee, FL
Riding the Wave, Anne Woods, Tiburon, CA
Ten Stories, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, New Orleans, LA
The Necklace, William Coles, Salt Lake City, UT
Thirty Days in the Springtime, Charles Broome, New Orleans, LA
Two Cranes, C.D. Noonan, Carrboro, NC
Unpaid Mourners, Ren Easterling Agena, Mandeville, LA
What Felt Good At The Time, Chris Waddington, New Orleans, LA
Wrestle the Rain, Garic Barranger, Covington, LA

For others who placed in the novel-in-progress category, Click Here!


Essay

The Society received 126 essay entries for the 2011 competition about average for this
category. The preliminary round judges were highly entertained by the wide range of subject matter introduced to this category this year and are complimentary about the unusual approaches some authors have used for their essays. Final manuscripts were judged by Rosemary Daniell, whose essays include many considered classics of southern literature and who had this to say about her judging process generally:

Judging the finalists in the essay competition was both exceedingly delightful and exceedingly difficult because of the quality of the entries. As I read, I looked for emotional truth; subtlety, nuance and subtext; good use of language; and, of course, originality.

And this to say about the winning manuscript:

The Man Who Was Not My Father by Jacob Appel is an amazing and beautifully written account of a choice made by Appel's grandmother that adversely affected the fates of family members living in Europe during World War II. The author seeks to understand the choice and why his grandmother made that choice. In the end, however, the author is unable to find the answers he seeks.

Winner:
The Man Who Was Not My Grandfather, Jacob Appel, New York, NY

Jacob M. Appel has published short fiction in some 200 literary journals including Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Apalachee Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Conjunctions, Confrontation, Colorado Review, Columbia, Florida Review, Gettysburg Review, Green Mountains Review, Greensboro Review, Gulf Stream, Iowa Review, Louisiana Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nebraska Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, Seattle Review, Shenandoah, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Southwest Review, Story Quarterly, Subtropics, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, West Branch, and Xavier Review. His nonfiction has appeared in Georgia Review, Massachusetts Review, and Ploughshares. Jacob’s short story, Shell Game with Organs, won the Boston Review Short Fiction Contest in 1998. Another story, Enoch Arden’s One Night Stands, won first prize in the New Millennium Writings competition in 2004. A third story, The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs, won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom short story competition. Jacob also has won competions sponsored by a variety of journals. His story about two census takers, Counting, was short listed for the O. Henry Award in 2001. Other stories received “special mention” for the Pushcart Prize in 2006, 2007 and 2009. His plays have been performed at the Manhattan Repertory Theatre, Adrienne Theatre (Philadelphia), Detroit Repertory Theatre, Heller Theater (Tulsa), Curtain Players (Columbus), Epilogue Players (Indianapolis), and Intentional Theatre (New London), and and have received more than 100 public readings. Jacob holds a B.A. and an M.A. from Brown University, an M.A. and and M.Phil. from Columbia University, an M.D. from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He has most recently taught at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was honored with the Undergraduate Council of Students Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003, and at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City. He also publishes in the field of bioethics and contributes to such publications as the Journal of Clinical Ethics,the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, the Hastings Center Report, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, TheBoston Globe, The Detroit Free Press, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Times, The Providence Journal, The New Haven Register, The Albany Times-Union, Orlando Sentinel and many regional newspapers. He currently practices psychiatry in New York City.

First Runner-Up:
In Apartment 102, Ellen Ann Fentress, Jackson, MS

Ellen Ann Fentress is a journalist and teacher in Jackson, MS, where she teaches writing workshops through Millsaps College. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, New Madrid, and Southern Women’s Review and on Mississippi public radio. She is an MFA graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Rosemary Daniell had this to say about Ellen's manuscript.

First runner up Ellen Ann Fentress's essay, In Apartment 102, is a piece that reflecs the dilemma still faced by many, many women writers, even many years after Virginia Woolf's famous essay, A Room of Her Own—that of the need for the solitude and spaciousness of mind required for literary creation, and the lengths one woman goes to to achieve it.

Equal Second Runners-Up:

Bird Dog, Terri Stoor, New Orleans, LA
See Ms. Stoors bio and photo above, as winner of the 2011 Short Stort Competition. Rosemary Daniell has this to say about Terri's essay

Terri Stoor gives us short and chilling account of her thwarted desire as an eight-year-old to save a wounded bird's life when her father's assigns her to act as a his hunting dog during a hunt.

Return to Civilization, Brian Schneider, St. Helen, MI

Brian Schneider won the 2010 Gold Medal for Best Short Story for his manuscript, Good Night, Uncle Vincent and also presented a paper on the Literature of War & Collateral Damage during Words & Music, 2010. He is a former U.S. Air Force Sergeant, former military contractor, and veteran of the American war in Afghanistan. He grew up in the small town of St. Helen in northern Michigan and has also lived in Italy and Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Maryland and a Master of Arts Degree in English from the University of British Columbia.  He currently is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Constance in Germany where he focuses on contemporary American war writing.  In addition, he also teaches English courses at U.S. military installations in Europe for the University of Maryland University College.  His fiction has appeared in several magazines and he is currently working to publish his first novel, This is Squalorville, about his experiences with the war in Afghanistan and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. His novel was a finalist in the 2011 competition.

Ms. Daniell has this to say about Brian's 2011 essay entry:

The author sensitively describes an Afghanistan veteran's search for peace and a new life after his return home—only to also face periodic disorientation.

JUDGE:

Rosemary Daniell's book Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women's Lives, was published by Henry Holt and Company, 2006 to great acclaim. Known as one of the best writing coaches in the country, Rosemary is the founder of Zona Rosa, the series of creative writing workshops she has led for 25 years in Savannah, Atlanta, Charleston, and other cities (including New Orleans), as well as in Europe. Her first book on Zona Rosa, The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living the Zona Rosa Way, was published by Faber & Faber in 1997. Daniell's revolutionary memoir, Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide in the Deep South (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980; Henry Holt & Company, 1989; Hill Street Press, 1999) won the 1999 Palimpsest Prize for a most-requested out-of-print book, and was re-issued that year. Along with her second memoir, Sleeping with Soldiers (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984), Fatal Flowers was a forerunner of the current memoir trend. She is the author of four other books of poetry and prose. Among her many awards are two N.E.A. Fellowships in creative writing, one in in poetry, another in fiction. For more on Ms. Daniell and her work, Click Here!

FINALISTS:

A Link to Life, Alan Huard, Metairie, LA
Bombs, Spirits, and Slow, Sensual Dances, Vana Plaisance, Abbeyville, LA
Cousin de la Louisiane: An Esoteric Pilmgramage, Ned Cheever, Texarkana, TX
Do You Want a Piece of Me, J. Ed Marston, Chatanooga, TN
Neanderthal in C Minor, Steven Wise, Columbia, MO
Ode to a Dropped "R", Penelope Dane, Baton Rouge, LA
Ray, Linda Prather, Vienna, VA
School Days, Wendy Ralph, Columbia, SC
The Demise of Quiet, Pat Gallant, New York, NY
Trying Once Again, Sudy Vance Leavy, Darien, GA
Unburnable, Karel Sloane-Boekbinder New Orleans, LA
When Dreams Turn Vivid, Kira Holt, Wimberly, TX

For others who placed in the novel-in-progress category, Click Here!

Poetry

In the poetry category, the Society received 101 entries and, again, we have received a lot of complimentary remarks from preliminary round readers about the originality of the theme material. The finalists were judged by internationally noted poet Rodger Kamenetz who had this to say about the winning manuscript:

The Passion of Louis Congo tells of the martyrdom of one of the important spirits of New Orleans, the leader of a slave revolt, LouisCongo.The tight narrative and lyric intensity make every move count, and bring this old spirit back to haunt us.

Winner:
The Passion of Louis Congo by M'Bilia Meekers, New Orleans, LA

M’Bilia Meekers is currently pursuing a B.A. at Tulane University. Her series of poems on Louis Congo also has won an American Voices medal in the 2011 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Ms. Meekers, who entered Tulane in the fall of 2011, is a graduate of Lusher Charter High School and former student of Lusher Creative Writing Director Brad Richard.
She was Runner-up in the Society’s High School Short Story Category in 2010 and again in 2011 for her manuscript, A Pinch of Morphine. M’Bilia read her winning poem at the 2011 annual meeting of the Words & Music Writers’ Alliance and will partiicpate with other Faulkner Society winners reading at Artfully Aware at New Orleans Museum of Art on February 4.

Equal Runners-up

No Waterline by Elizabeth Tsubai, Bellaire, TX

Elizabeth Tsubai is a native Texan who spent her formative years in New Orleans. Libby is also a comedy writer/performer and a former member of Houston’s Third Coast Comedy troupe. Libby integrates her craft with her work as a palliative care and bioethics specialist: Her one-act play, A Conversation with Tiffany, is a biting satire about an elderly woman’s death in an ICU. It has been performed to rave reviews at healthcare conferences and venues across the country. In 2006 Libby was honored by the Houston Chronicle for her innovation in end-of-life education. She lives in Bellaire, TX with husband Kenzo and daughter Miko.

Rodger Kamenetz had this to say about this manuscript entry:

No Waterline’s central character  "Miz Clo" chooses to await her fate in the Ninth Ward as Katrina approaches. An excellent character study.|

My Women by Anne Webster, Atlanta, GA

Anne Webster is a registered nurse, who has had a successful medical career in addition to her work as a writer. A History of Nursing, Anne’s poetry collection (Kennesaw State University Press, 2009) was a nominee for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in such literary journals as Southern Poetry Review, The New York Quarterly, and Rattle. Her essays  have been published in the anthologies: Final Moments, A Call to Nursing, and View from the Bed/View from the Bedside. She also contributed a chapter in The Poetry of Nursing: Poems and Commentaries by Leading Nurse Poets,  a text used in Medicine & Literature and Creative Writing curricula. She lives in Atlanta.

And the judge had this to say about Ms. Webster's entry:

A highly original concept, My Women is a complete family history told through Russian dolls.

JUDGE:
Rodger Kamenetz, poet, essayist, non-fiction author, teacher, and popular lecturer, will judge the poetry category of the 2011 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. For the last several years, Rodger has been deeply involved in research and analysis of what our dreams mean, research which produced the compelling book, The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul. Since this non-fiction work was published Rodger has continued his research and, during Words & Music, he will address. The Importance of Last Night's Dreams in the Global Village. Kamenetz is the bestselling author of The Jew in the Lotus, his journey through Bhuddism to recover his faith as a Jew, including lengthy interview sessions with the Dali Llama, Stalking Ellijah, and Terra Infirma, a brilliant memoir about the author's relationship with his mother in his dreams after her death. Last year, he published the non-fiction work, Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman Of Bratslav and Franz Kafka, the links between two incredible storytellers. For more on Rodger and his work, Click Here!

OTHER FINALISTS:

Absence, S. T. Eleu, Chicago, IL
A Lullaby for Kjerstin, Garic Barranger, Covington, LA
An Absence of Crocodiles:An Antiphon for Two Choirs, Garic Barranger, Covington, LA
Condolences, Amy Arthur, Chicago, IL
evermore, mr. Poe, Nettie Parker Bauman, West Hartford, CT
Jimmy The Bass Player’s Restaurant Reviews, Stephen T. Roberts, LaGrangeville, NY
Last Dinner at Louie’s with Levis, Jane Satterfield, Baltimore, MD
Mania, Nettie Parker Bauman, West Hartford, CT
new century/old century, three acts, Tad Bartlett, New Orleans, LA
Materialistic Virtues, Kiki Denis, New York, NY
Nuit Blanche, Alex Mandella, New Orleans, LA
Plastic Cup Pantoum, Jeanette deVeer, Arabi, LA
Spirit Vessels, Dennis Fomento, Slidell, LA
The Homeless Trilogy, Pat Gallant, New York, NY
The Whirlwind Sessions, Manfred Pollard, New Orleans, LA
Treat Yourself to the Magnificent Enchantment, Jenn Marie Nunes, Baton Rouge, LA
Voyage of the Limit Perfected Fish, J. Ed Marston, Chatanooga, TN

For others who placed in the novel-in-progress category, Click Here!

Short Story by a High School Student

The Faulkner Society received 197 entries from 21 states in this category. The High School Short Story category was judged by author Tom Carson, who had this to say about the
manuscript he selected as winner:

Reading fiction by young writers, you expect to see signs of promise.  What you don't  expect is a story that  has you saying "Wow" from first sentence to last. The author of
Nerve Endings makes readers sit up and demand to know "What's next?" with an opening paragraph calmly describing how the piano-playing heroine's fingers grew to be two feet long, a metaphor for creativity's deformities that we can all  instinctively understand. Then we follow Michelle through everything her fingers do to her and she does to her fingers. The voyage is sometimes funny, sometimes cruel, and all true even if it's all preposterous. Making something true out of something preposterous is a gift only born writers have.

WINNER:

Nerve Endings, Ruth Marie Landry, Metairie, LA


Ruthie Landry is a seventeen-year-old junior at the Academy of the Sacred Heart and a level two creative writing student at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts.

She loves writing and animals and also enjoys programming, embroidery, and listening to loud music.

Technology simultaneously scares, intrigues, and inspires her to write. Ruthie is extremely grateful to her wonderful creative writing teachers at NOCCA, Andy Young and Anne Gisleson, who have pushed her to experiment and have helped her grow more confident and comfortable with her work, and to her parents, Michael and Elizabeth Landry, who support her even through her antics.

 

 

Equal Runners-Up

The Wait Before Paradise, Anthony Otten, Erlander, KY

Anthony J. Otten’s work has been published in Blue Lake Review, Funds for Writers, Short Story America, Houston Literary Review, Aletheia magazine, and Poetry Quarterly.

Judge Tom Carson had this to say about Anthony's entry:

A first encounter with death is a topic many teen writers attempt. But few of them do it with this much impassioned pursuit of evocative language, this grasp of the right prelude, or this sense of the issues -- large and small -- that get churned up by the event.  The author of The Wait Before Paradise sets out to grapple with the biggest subjects, but also knows that there's no such thing as a trivial detail when it's in the right place.

Note: The authors below have yet to submit their bios and photos. We will post when we
receive.

Fourteen, Sarah Reiner, New Orleans, LA

Tom Carson had this to say about this manuscript entry:

My guess is that some people will wonder if this story is silly. That's the point, because the author of Fourteen is trying to pin down the exact moment when profound things start to seem silly and silly things start to feel profound.  In other words, the heroine is coping with an adolescent epiphany that proves nothing in the long run and means everything in the short one. And this writer knows the difference.

An Unimportant Occurence, Gideon Vincini, New Orleans, LA

The judge had this to say about Gideon's manuscript entry:

The author of An Unimportant Occurrence puts us on notice by signaling right up front that it's an experiment in point of view. Yet the experiment's success is in the human dimensions revealed by the game-playing. By the end, we're convinced that these people -- and this incident -- wouldn't be as memorable if they weren't filtered through so many prisms.  This writer understands that seeing things fresh is what fiction is all about.

Purging, Jeanette deVeer, Arabi, LA

Tom Carson had this to say about Jeanette's manuscript entry:

Stories written in the first person always risk hitting a false note, whether that means tripping over a locution we don't believe the character would use in real life or else spotting perceptions that transparently belong to the writer instead.  But the young narrator of  Purging—uneducated but bright, moody yet practical—is completely convincing throughout, and so are his mother and his Uncle Fritz.  Besides knowing how to make a plainspoken vocabulary express complicated emotions, the author shows a real  —and rare—sense of how to put words together for maximum rhythmic effect, something most readers won't need to be conscious of to be lured by anyway. 

JUDGE

Tom Carson, author of the new novel Daisy Buchanan’s Daughter, also is the author of Gilligan’s Wake, a New York Times Notable Book of The Year for 2003. Currently GQ’s “The Critic,” he won two National Magazine Awards for criticism as Esquire magazine’s “Screen” columnist and has been nominated two more times since then. He also won the CRMA criticism award for his book reviews in Los Angeles magazine. Before that, he wrote extensively about pop culture and politics for the LA Weekly and the Village Voice, including an obituary for Richard Nixon in the latter that the late Norman Mailer termed “brilliant.” He has contributed over the years to publications ranging from Rolling Stone to the Atlantic Monthly. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Black Clock. His verse and other random writings can be found at tomcarson.net. In 1979, he was the youngest contributor — with an essay on the Ramones — to Greil Marcus’s celebrated rock anthology, Stranded. With Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon, he edited Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough: Essays In Honor of Robert Christgau in 2002. Born in Germany in 1956, he grew up largely abroad “at the hands of the U.S. State Department.” He graduated in 1977 from Princeton University, where he won the Samuel Shellabarger award for creative writing. A former resident of Washington, D.C., New York City, and Los Angeles, he now lives in New Orleans with his wife, Arion Berger, and can be found all too often at Buffa’s Lounge on Saints’ days. For more on Carson and his new novel, Click Here!
Photo here by Victoria F.Gaitàn.

OTHER FINALISTS

A Pinch of Morphine, M’Bilia Meekers, New Orleans, LA
Bewitched Mill, Alex Mandela, New Orleans, LA
Conversations with Old People, Kim Tran, Arlington, TX
Cube Perception, Lauren Armantrout, New Orleans, LA,
How Mice Vanish, Allie Casala, New Orleans, LA,
More, Asiah Crutchfield, New Orleans, LA
Ready, Able, Ryanne Autin, New Orleans, LA
Shells, Raley Pellittieri, Ponchatoula, LA
Sickle in the Night, Tyler Lirette, Boutte, LA
Silence, Alison Poulin, New Orleans, LA

For others who placed in the novel-in-progress category, Click Here!