Celebrating the Winners of the 2024 Dogwood Literary Awards

The editors would like to thank the hundreds of writers who entered the 2024 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 this rich compilation possible. 

We congratulate Barbara Cameron, Mirande Bissell, and Aimee LaBrie for their awards in nonfiction, poetry, and fiction respectively.  See their bios and those of judges below. We also thank our judges, Heather Lanier (Nonfiction), Hirsh Sawhney (Fiction), and Alison Joseph (Poetry) for their hard work in choosing the winners of this year’s Dogwood Literary Awards. 

The portal for the 2025 awards will open July 1st, and we encourage all interested writers to consider entering. Familiarize yourself with a back issue of the magazine or subscribe by clicking on the “buy” tab in the menu above.  

2024 Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction:  Barbara Cameron

The editors are pleased to announce that judge Heather Lanier chose Barbara Cameron’s essay “At the End of Cherry Tree Lane” as the winner of this year’s Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction. Barbara Cameron will receive $1,000 and her story will be published in the Dogwood 2024 edition.

Of Cameron’s essay, Lanier writes:

“‘At the End of Cherry Tree Lane’ is a masterful work of personal narrative. The piece unveils layers upon layers, as the author expresses the tension between what a child dreams of her father, and who he actually is. The essay is not only an empathetic portrait of a complex man, but also an insightful reflection on how we cope with such people when love entangles us. I was completely engrossed and utterly moved. You will be, too!”

Winner Barbara Cameron lives with her son Jack Ulysses and their cats, Little Boy and Little Girl, in Los Angeles, where she manages The Tower Bar restaurant in the historic Sunset Tower Hotel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in 86 Logic, Hobart, Award Winner in the North American Review Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize, Hunger Mountain (winner, Howard Frank Mosher Prize Short Fiction), and American Literary Review (winner, American Literary Review Creative Nonfiction Award).

Judge Heather Lanier is the author of the poetry collection, Psalms of Unknowing (Monkfish Publishing 2023) as well as the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin Press 2020), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Sun, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Longreads, McSweeney’s, TIME, and elsewhere. She works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University, and her TED talk has been viewed 3 million times and translated into 18 languages. You can sign up for her Substack, The Slow Take, for free.

2024 Dogwood Literary Award in Poetry:  Mirande Bissell

Judge Alison Joseph chose Mirande Bissell’s poem “Incomplete Quadriplegia” as the winner of this year’s 2024 Dogwood Literary Award in Poetry. Of the prizewinning poem, Judge Joseph wrote, “This haunting poem brings the reader to a moment of extreme crisis. It’s a vital, beautifully crafted poem—but that craft does not disguise the trauma (and drama) of the high stakes situation at hand. Poems that make me feel compassion without pity are rare. ‘Incomplete Quadriplegia’ does this succinctly and artfully.”

Winner Mirande Bissell is a writer and teacher who lives in the Patapsco River Valley, west of Baltimore. Her first book of poems, Stalin at the Opera, was selected by Diane Seuss for the Ghost Peach Press Prize and was published in 2021. 

 Poetry Judge Alison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she serves as Professor of English at Southern Illinois University. Her books include Lexicon (Red Hen Press), winner of the Poetry by the Sea Conference Best Book of the Year, and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press), which won the Feathered Quill Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry. She is the widow of the late poet, editor, and critic Jon Tribble.

2024 Dogwood Literary Award in Fiction: Aimee LaBrie

Fiction Judge Hirsh Sawhney writes of Aimee LaBrie’s story, “A Girl’s Guide to Surviving (or Avoiding) a Kidnapping,” “This piece is not only terrifying and suspenseful, but it also sheds light on the consequences of violence and assault with a great deal of sophistication. The author has imbued this story with a keen sense of emotionality, and she is also concerned with larger questions of politics, history, and ethics. There is something uncanny going on with time here, and yet I never felt disoriented; it was clear that I was in the hands of a skilled and purposeful storyteller.”

Winner Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have appeared in the The Minnesota Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, StoryQuarterly, Cimarron Review, Fractured Lit, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Permafrost Magazine, and others. Her second short story collection, Rage and Other Cages, won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize and will be published by Leapfrog Press in 2024. In 2007, her short story collection, Wonderful Girl, was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and published by the University of North Texas Press. Aimee teaches creative writing at Rutgers University 

Judge Hirsh Sawhney is the author of a novel, South Haven, and the editor of a fiction anthology, Delhi Noir. His writing has appeared in The TLS, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Harvard Review, and numerous other periodicals.

Congratulations to our winners and finalists, all of whom will soon appear in Dogwood 23, out by the end of May!