Announcing… the 2023 Dogwood Literary Awards!

This year we awarded $1,000 prizes in three genres; we are grateful to our many contest entrants, who by entering the competition make it possible to produce Dogwood. We also thank our judges, Jessica Handler (Fiction), Victorian Buitron (Nonfiction), and Joan Kwon Glass (Poetry) for their hard work in choosing the winners of this year’s Dogwood Literary Awards. In addition to the prize winner in each genre, we publish the work of all finalists. The portal for the 2024 awards will open July 1st, and we encourage all interested writers to visit our website at http://www.dogwoodliterary.com. 

Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction

Our nonfiction winner is Naomi Bindman’s essay, “Love’s Imprint.” Nonfiction judge Victoria Buitron writes, “Naomi Bindman excavates the loss of her daughter in an evocative braided essay that left me wondering how anyone could create such deep beauty in the midst of profound grief. The Kübler-Ross theory describes facing death through the following stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They are all present in ‘Love’s Imprint,’ as well as yearning, devotion, and a tenderness present both at the sentence level and as a whole. Like the title states, Bindman’s piece will stay etched in your mind—deeply imprinted—long after you read its final word.”

Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator who hails from Ecuador and resides in Connecticut. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, SmokeLong en Español, The Offing, and other literary magazines. A VONA fellow, her work has been selected for 2022’s Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. Her debut memoir-in-essays, A Body Across Two Hemispheres, is the 2021 Fairfield Book Prize winner and available wherever books are sold.

Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction

Fiction Judge Jessica Handler writes of Roger Hart’s story, “In Which Nothing Happens Until Everything Does,” “The authorial voice is engaging and confident. We’re drawn in to the protagonist (Russ)’s world right away, and stay with him to the end, leaving this memorable story with the knowledge that he’s beginning to sort out his complicated, funny, and well-written life. Well-crafted work, and I wish the author the best.”

Jessica Handler is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a SIBA Okra Pick. Her memoir, Invisible Sisters, was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Oldster, Full Grown People, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post and elsewhere. She lives in Atlanta.  http://www.jessicahandler.com.

Dogwood Literary Award in Poetry

Joan Kwon Glass writes of poetry winner Jennifer Goldring’s poem, “Instructions for Recording Bird Vocalizations” that the work “made this reader ponder grief and loss to suicide in a new way. Instructions asks the reader to find solace in a journey that leads both away from and toward pain, away from self and into the disorienting, centering woods of mourning, until you “reach the grace of your uncertainty.” This is a poem about what we can and cannot experience as a human being, still alive, and reeling from acute loss. Instructions found me entrenched in my own humanity, listening for my own heartbeat, wondering if I’d already “seen something flying.”

Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM (winner of the Diode Editions Book Contest) & three chapbooks. She serves as poet laureate of Milford, CT, Editor-in-Chief for Harbor Review, as a Brooklyn Poets Mentor, is a proud Smith College graduate & has been a public school educator for 20 years. Joan serves on the faculty of Hudson Valley Writers Center & the Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, her work has won or been finalist for several prizes & her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize & Sundress Anthology Best of the Net. Joan’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), RHINO, Rattle, Dialogist & elsewhere. Please follow her on Twitter @joanpglass and see her website at http://www.joankwonglass.com.