Short Fiction Prize - Current Winners

2021

First Prize:

Camry Romney, "Hosanna!"
“Hosanna!” by Camry Romney is the first-place winner. Robert Lopez applauds the fact that “Hosanna! crackles with urgency and the sharp language of a true artist who sees the tired old world with its tired old people like it’s something fresh and new. Here we have a writer in control of voice and emotion and pushes the language to exciting and dangerous places. I felt this narrator in my marrow, as they struggled with a very tough upbringing. Bracing, honest, real.”

Bio: Winner Camry Romney is an Arizona native majoring in creative fiction at Arizona State University. The publication of “Hosanna!” in TSR: The Southampton Review, Winter/Spring 2022, represents her print debut.

Runners-up:

Ben Chumney-Perez, "Corpus Christi"
“Corpus Christi” by Ben Perez“is a perfect example of a writer risking form and language and emotion,” Robert Lopez notes. “Hunger, confusion, honesty, and above all, artistry, is on display in this genre-bending story of complicated relationships. This is definitely a writer to keep an eye on.”

Bio:  Ben Chumney-Perez is a senior studying English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Katherine Serna
“Father’s Day for Abandoned Children” by Katherine Serna. This story, Lopez writes, “has a young woman coming of age under complicated and difficult circumstances. The writer makes you care about this young narrator and demonstrates how all of us have tough choices to make and our own paths to blaze.”

Bio:  Katherine Serna, a senior at the University of Rochester, is majoring in Creative Writing and Dance, with minors in Latin American Studies and Political Science, is originally from Laredo, Texas. Serna interned at Laredo’s Elusive Publishing, and was a Volunteer Legal Services Project in Rochester. A Meliora Scholar, supporting humanistic research, Serna’s film Compañeras, won first prize in the Undergraduate Writing Colloquium for the Multimodal category, hosted by the U of R’s Writing, Speaking & Argument, a Dean’s Prize for Short Fiction Creative Writing. Her poetry has appeared in Masked: A Student Anthologycreated by the U of R’s English Department. Serna is “passionate about social justice issues” and ways in which artists can effect change.

Our Judge:

Robert Lopez, the judge of this competition, is the distinguished author of the novels Part of the World, All Black Full, and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, named as one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant. He has also written two story collections, Asunder and Good People. His upcoming books include A Better Class of People, published by Dzanc Books and Dispatches from Puerto Nowhere, from Two Dollar Radio. His writings have appeared in Bomb, The Threepenny Review, Vice Magazine, New England Review, The Sun, and the Norton Anthology of Sudden Fiction—Latino.