I am proud to announce our 2011 Big Fish Online Winner: "When Lewis Carroll Faced the Jabberwocky" by Todd Seabrook. Thanks to everyone that submitted this year! Please enjoy the winning piece below. Click image to see full sized poem!
The Literary Journal of the University of Montana
Announcing our 2025 Genre Contest Winners:
We are excited to announce this year’s genre contest winners, as selected by Zoë Bossiere, Corrie Williamson, and Tom Lin. Submissions to the contest were exceptional this year. Thanks to all who shared their work with us! The winning pieces will be published in CutBank 103.
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Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction
Judged by Zoë Bossiere
Winner, “On Failed Rifts and Intrusive Bodies” by Emily Rose Soreghan
Praise from Zoë Bossiere: "Beautifully rendered and as layered as the landscapes it describes, 'On Failed Rifts and Intrusive Bodies' captures the complexity of grieving what never was, but could have been. A clear-eyed meditation on the perennial nature of birth and death, the ways we try and fail to find answers to the earth’s oldest questions."
Emily Rose Soreghan is a writer from Oklahoma. She’s worked as a baker, barista, farmhand, florist, dishwasher, housecleaner, and journalist, a body of experience she mines to write about restlessness and desire on the Southern Plains.
Runner-up, “Area Woman” by Maureen Stanton
Praise from Zoë Bossiere: "At turns informative, personal, and often highly amusing, 'Area Woman' is thoroughly-researched and reported consideration of the contemporary phenomenon of “binge watching” television. What begins with a simple question becomes a fascinating look at our relationship with media—for better and, in the case of 'bingeing,' potentially for worse."
Maureen Stanton is the author of The Murmur of Everything Moving: A Memoir, winner of the Donald Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, and two other award-winning nonfiction books. Her essays have been widely published. www.maureenstantonwriter.com
Finalists
“Grasshoppers” by Andi Boyd | “The Physics of Happiness” by Elaina Erola | “Your Lebanon: Four Sides” by Sandra Khalil | “The Eye of God” by Jean McDonough | “Chiron the Wounded Healer” by Shane Neilson | “Community, According to Sand” by Lisa Peters | “Senescence” by Lisa Shroyer
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Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry
Judged by Corrie Williamson
Winner, “When it happens” by Laura Post
Praise from Corrie Williamson: "I love this rich, disorienting, reverberating poem, its strange braided circumstances and its twining of a possible, vast natural disaster with something sharp and personal and seemingly just outside the poem’s focused lens. The sections beautifully traverse the ominous (that huge pawprint in the first section echoing down to the garbage-raiding bear in the last one) and the decadent (those bikini glad skiers, their sparkle) and the collision of forces natural and human. The poem captures a kind of slippage and loss that feels both universal and individual, vivid but mysterious. I was haunted by this one."
Laura Post is a writer from New Jersey who currently resides in Northeastern Ohio. She holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in Creative Nonfiction from Ohio University. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Plume 9, The Moth Magazine, Invisible City, New South, Your Impossible Voice, Barnstorm, and elsewhere.
Runner-up, “Learning to Swim” by Heather Bourbeau
Praise from Corrie Williamson: "I’m moved by this poem’s structure, its richly detailed bracketing (spring rain and fruit blossoms at the start, the speaker’s shifting childhood relationship with the sea at the close) providing a kind of framing of the loss of a loved one that deftly bridges the familiar and the intensely personal. The poem offers us a metaphor for learning to live with grief – to move through it, to be surrounded by it, perhaps – that’s accessible but complicated by the speaker’s own evolving feelings. That shout at the end – the return to the shared life, to a child’s joy, is perfect, and generously, authentically bittersweet."
Heather Bourbeau’s poetry has appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia. Her latest collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West.
Finalists
“Love is in the Bin” by Veronica Bettencourt | “I-57” by Gabriel Costello | "Variations on Folded Sonnet #10" by Benjamin Faro | “Mountain Boys by James Long | “Advice for Boarding School” by Ruby Murray | “Fight Night” by Philip Schaefer | “1972” by Jennifer Sutherland | “Prayer for St. Cedd” by Talin Tahajian
Announcing our 2024-2025 Big Sky, Small Prose Winners:
WINNER: Insley Smullen, “When Mama Was Pregnant with Shotgun, She Experienced Miracles
Insley Smullen is a poet and photographer living in San Francisco. Their writing has appeared in Poetry Fix and orangepeel magazine, and they have been previously nominated for Best New Poets and two Pushcart prizes. They are the author of the poetry book Dirt Gods (Codorus Press).
RUNNER-UP: Amy Marques, “This Is Not a Starry Night”
Amy Marques grew up between languages and learned, from an early age, the multiplicity of narratives. She’s artist and author of PARTS and editor and artist for the Duets anthologies. More at https://amybookwhisperer.wordpress.com.
RUNNER-UP: Sara Dudo, “POSTCARD FROM EVERYWHERE”
Sara Dudo is an adjunct professor of writing and a recent MFA graduate from University of Nevada Las Vegas. Her work has recently been published in The Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Idaho Review, The Notre Dame Review, The Portland Review, The Oakland Review, and Southwest Review, and she has poems forthcoming in the Minnesota Review and the Iowa Review. In her writing, she loves exploring everything nature-related and the intersections of the body and landscape. She also enjoys implementing scientific language as a tool in evaluating memory and behavior, and exploring how illness shapes and redefines relationships.
Announcing our 2024 Genre Contest Winners:
April 23, 2024
We are excited to announce the winners and finalists of the 2024 CutBank Genre Contests, judged by Christine Byl, Toni Jensen, and Christina Olson. We appreciate every submission we get — thank you for the opportunity to read your work. The winning stories will be published in CutBank 101 this summer.
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Winner, Montana Prize in Nonfiction: “Kansas Tries to Say Goodbye” by Ruby Hansen Murray
Judged by Toni Jensen
Praise for “Kansas Tries to Say Goodbye” from Toni Jensen: “In “Kansas Tries to Say Goodbye,” Ruby Hansen Murray centers Osage language reclamation and community building in its rightful home on the South Plains. This essay shows the importance of language and land while also telling the compelling story of the language teachers, their histories and processes and deep commitment. The essay’s images and language carry the beauty and motion of the place and people with grace and love. It’s a beautiful portrait of connection.”
Ruby Hansen Murray is a columnist for the Osage News and a MacDowell and Hedgebrook fellow. Find her in Cascadia: A Field Guide, Ecotone, Pleiades, Moss, World Literature Today, the Massachusetts Review, The Rumpus, and Colorlines. She’s a citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations with West Indian roots living along the Columbia River.
2024 Nonfiction Contest Finalists:
“Things Not to Be Said” by Gabriel Furshong
"Jesus and the Gavacha" by Carrie Hall
"Jennifer’s Room, Sadeta’s Job, My House" by Isabelle Stillman
“A True Fiction" by Rachael Weaver
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Winner, Montana Prize in Fiction: “Joining the Pack” by E. Klein
Judged by Christine Byl
Praise for “Joining the Pack” from Christine Byl: “I have always been fascinated by the lives of dogs, and believe them to be kin to humans, yet it’s the rare story that can inhabit an animal’s consciousness without raising my hackles. E. Klein’s “Joining the Pack” is a rare story—inventive but unselfconscious, empathetic but not sentimental, and weird in the best possible way. With choices of diction, syntax and rhythm, the story creates its own logic, making for a nimble, imaginative romp that grabs a reader by the scruff and licks our sorrows into belonging.”
E. William Klein is from Ketchikan, Alaska, and worked in the commercial fishing industry there for 8 years. He received his MFA in Fiction from the Helen Zell Writer's program at the University of Michigan in 2016. His writing was awarded Honorable Mention in Bellevue Literary Review's 2024 Goldberg Prize for Fiction and has otherwise appeared in Carve and MQR.
2024 Fiction Contest Finalists:
"Losing It" by Conor Hogan
“Stones Unturned” by Matthew Pitt
"Let That Be Your Pill” by Stacey Resnikoff
“Hammer and Tongs" by Brian Roberts
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Winner, Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry: “Sometimes when I am traveling alone I think of having a drink again in an airport bar” by Caitlin Scarano
Judged by Christina Olson
Praise for “Sometimes when I am traveling alone I think of having a drink again in an airport bar” by Christina Olson: "I love a good narrative poem, and "Sometimes when I am traveling alone I think of having a drink again in an airport bar" isn't a good narrative poem, it's a great one. We're in the airport with our speaker, wrestling with the dilemma to break seven years of sobriety, and then here comes the father, singing and cooing to his rotten liver. The airport is littered with men, their suitcase wheels making noise, and the father, not in the airport but riding on the shoulders of the speaker, and the estranged family, and the limitations of the body. Our speaker weaves all this trauma into a brief, shining story of abuse and heartbreak and--most essentially--survival. Sometimes we sit next to strangers at airport bars to hear stories; sober or not, you don't need to make friends over a $17 Heineken when you have this poem, which is better than any story a businessman connecting through DFW could tell you anyway.”
Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full length collection of poems,* The Necessity of Wildfire*, was a finalist for the WA State Book Award. Find her at caitlinscarano.com.
2024 Patricia Goedicke Contest Runner-Up:
"Shortly Before the New Year" by Brent Schaeffer (to be published in issue #101 also!)
2024 Patricia Goedicke Contest Finalists:
“The Passion” and other poems by Daniel DeVaughn
"What the Othered Can’t Have" and other poems by Rosa Lane
“we had a picnic” and other poems by Nicole Santalucia
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Announcing our 2023-2024 Big Sky, Small Prose Winners:
WINNER: Julia LoFaso, “Water Healing”
Praise from guest judge Micah Fields:
"I want to tap my own spring," LoFaso asserts in the concluding lines of "Water Healing," a masterfully concise essay about bridges and the power of what lies beneath them. Like most great essays, LoFaso's brings the reader along in the process--however messy and winding it may be--of the writer's honest search for something (meaning, truth, memory, beauty, connection, et al.) As "Water Healing" insightfully toggles between the practice of hydropathy, the saga of the Brooklyn Bridge's construction, and the author's own draw to the water as a link between present and past selves, we are there to draw the invisible lines connecting stories, learning in real-time to construct the tension cables and calculate curves the way engineer John Roebling's wife Emily did when "water-curing" could not save his life. LoFaso's meditation on postpartum existence and the draw of water builds an intricate collage worth studying again and again.
Julia LoFaso is writing a hybrid collection about weird motherhood and various forms of solace seeking. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Cincinnati Review, Iowa Review, and others. More of her writing is available at julialofaso.com.
RUNNER-UP: Elita Suratman, “Brown Paper Package”
Praise from guest judge Micah Fields:
In a brief yet moving recollection, "Brown Paper Package" explores the author's relationship with the culinary ephemera of Ramadan, a tradition the writer has "long transgressed since moving to the U.S." Each delicately rendered image in the essay forms the author's own "private cultural cache," a chorus of carefully wrapped pastries and Malay spices that conjure scents of a life once lived far away. To open the package each year is a kind of homecoming and aching nostalgia for the author, as bittersweet as the parcel's contents.
Elita Suratman emigrated from Singapore with dreams of following in her father’s footsteps as a writer. A master’s degree, family and a twenty-year marketing career later, she’s discovering her writing roots, working on a cross-continent memoir on her flyway toward self-identity. Excerpts can be found in Flights and Herstry. You can find more of her work here: http://elitasuratman.com/.
RUNNER-UP: Alan Sincic, “Fuse”
Praise from guest judge Micah Fields:
"Fuse" is a thrilling and crafty little sentence of an essay. It's a piece of art about art, which is to say it's about everything, and the writer handles the scope of this task with a deft hand. The work is playful and profound. Not only did I love reading it, but it reminded me why I love reading.
Alan's fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Boulevard Online, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Recent stories won contests sponsored by Hunger Mountain, Prime Number, The Texas Observer, Orison, Meridian, Azure and others. You can visit him at alansincic.com.