2023 Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Prize Winner!
Thanks to everyone who entered this year’s Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest. Our judge, Debra Gwartney, has selected the essay “Still Life” by Monica Judge as the 2023 winner.
Gwartney called “Still Life” an “exquisitely tender essay” that “holds out to the reader a needle-prick of knowledge we are loathe to live with: the mortality of one’s children. With deft layers of inquiry, the writer recognizes the incapacitating grip of fear inside of her, the chasm of potential loss, and yet the writing is infused with the playful hope and ease of everyday life. Beautifully realized and deeply moving.”
Monica Judge will receive a $1,000 award for her essay and will be featured in issue 26.1 (Spring 2024) of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction.
Monica Judge
Monica Judge‘s work has appeared in AGNI, Southern Humanities Review, River Teeth Beautiful Things blog, New Delta Review, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net Anthology and was a finalist for the Stories Out of School contest held in partnership with The Academy for Teachers and A Public Space. She is a high school English teacher and lives in Maryland with her husband and two children.
HONORABLE MENTION
Debra Gwartney also selected an honorable mention: “Divination,” by Faith Shearin, which Gwartney described as a “gorgeously meandering, complex piece of writing.”
Faith Shearin
Faith Shearin is the 2021 winner of The Global Fiction Prize, and the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Darwin’s Daughter and Lost Language. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.