After much deliberation, our judges have announced the winners of CutBank’s 2020 genre contest! Winning pieces will be featured in the forthcoming issue of CutBank 93, due out this summer. Thank you to everyone who submitted. It is always an honor to read your work.
2020 Montana Prize in Fiction, judged by Andrew Sean Greer
K.C. Mead-Brewer, author of “The Hidden People”
Winner: "The Hidden People" by K.C. Mead-Brewer
Andrew Sean Greer had this to say about "The Hidden People":
"I found the portrayal of their friendship, and the local descriptions, so well done, but it’s really how the author manages to insert a layer of mystery, and horror, that makes the story twice as good. A well-told unsettling story that seems, somehow, perfect for these times. I left it with a sense that the world is not what we think it is."
K.C. Mead-Brewer’s fiction appears in Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Joyland Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She’s a graduate of Tin House's 2018 Winter Workshop and the 2018 Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop. Check out kcmeadbrewer.com and follow @meadwriter
Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less. Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco.
Finalists:
Sophia Veltfort
Stephen Hundley
Ellen Skirvin
Craig Pearson
2020 Montana Prize in Nonfiction, judged by Chris La Tray
Robert Rebein, author of “Welcome to the Hotel Sabra”
Winner: “Welcome to the Hotel Sabra" by Robert Rebein
Chris La Tray had this to say about "Welcome to the Hotel Sabra":
"This old school adventure/travel-type yarn is the kind of thing that so many years ago made me fall in love with narrative nonfiction in the first place. It is exciting, humorous, and fun, and that’s what I need to be reading more of these days."
Robert Rebein is the author of two book-length works of creative nonfiction, Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home (University Press of Kansas, 2017) and Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City (Swallow Press, 2013). He teaches creative writing at IUPUI in Indianapolis where he also serves as Interim Dean of the IU School of Liberal Arts.
Chris La Tray is a writer and a walker. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays From the World At Large (2018, Riverfeet Press) won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His next book, Becoming Little Shell, will be published by Milkweed Editions in Spring 2021. Chris is Chippewa-Cree Métis, and is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He lives near Missoula, MT.
Finalists:
Will Howard
Faith Shearin
Sarah Capdeville
CMarie Fuhrman
2020 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, judged by Heather Cahoon
Kathleen Madrid, author of “Kin—"
Winner: “Kin—" by Kathleen Madrid
Heather Cahoon had this to say about “Kin—":
"I selected “Kin—" for its striking images (flight of wildfowl, red-throated shame, jackoak, mangrove, pig thistle, puncturevine, and venom) and the rhythm of the lines when read aloud. I love the question it ruminates on, “What makes blood thicker than water?” and the answers it supplies: a man “with florid nose, in Roman tones” who “split for Denver” and a woman who wears “lipsticks in every red” and smokes cigarettes, a woman who “loves me to distraction and drinks”. Amid baggage, gaps, ashtrays and addiction, the speaker winds down this poem with a final, brief meditation on Kin, writing, “like winter. And time / Pine branches free of / leaves. Everyone who / didn’t.'"
Kathleen Madrid is an alumna of the Poetry Collective at Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop. Her poetry has appeared in Rue Scribe, Twyckenham Notes, 8 Poems, and others. Her poem “Sisters—Suvarova” was nominated for Best of the Net 2019.
Heather Cahoon, PhD, received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana where she was the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholar. She has been awarded a Merriam Frontier Prize, a Potlatch Fund Native Arts grant and a Montana Arts Council Artist Innovation Award. Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Yellow Medicine Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Carve, and Cutthroat among others. Her first full length collection of poems entitled Horsefly Dress, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press in fall of 2020. Heather is also a federal Indian policy scholar and Assistant Professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana. She grew up on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana and is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.
Finalists:
Hari Alluri
Benjamin Gucciardi
Jennifer Pons
The 2021 Montana Prizes in Creative Nonfiction and Fiction, as well as the Patricia Goedicke Poetry Prize, open on November 9, 2020. Stay tuned for an announcement about the upcoming year’s judges.