Past Winners & Finalists
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The 2017 DISQUIET Literary Prize Winners
DISQUIET International is happy to announce the winners in each genre, including one grand prize winner, for our 2017 Literary Prize, in partnership with Guernica, NinthLetter.com, and The Collagist. A big thank you to all those who entered!
POETRY WINNER: “Kul” by Fatimah Asghar
Fatimah Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer. Her work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on news outlets like PBS, NBC, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011, she created Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first Spoken Word Poetry group, REFLEKS, while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise collective and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After was released on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer of Brown Girls, a web series that highlights a friendship between women of color. Currently, she is an MFA candidate at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
TOP 5 FINALISTS IN POETRY:
“Memento Mori,” by Maggie Millner
“A History of Feminism,” by Karen Hildebrand
“Eleven Days,” by David Colodney
“Mountain Lion,” by Jordan Bissell
“Good,” by Liberty Ferda
FICTION WINNER: “Midwestern Girl is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories” by Gwen E. Kirby
Gwen E. Kirby’s stories appear in Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a proud graduate of Carleton College, holds an MFA from Johns Hopkins University, and is currently pursing her PhD at the University of Cincinnati. During the summer, she works for the Sewanee Young Writers’ and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.
TOP 5 FINALISTS IN FICTION:
“Mathematics in the Age of Anxiety” by Emily Franklin
“Me Too” by Theodore Wheeler
NON-FICTION and GRAND PRIZE WINNER: “Memory, Loss” by Ru Freeman
Ru Freeman is the author of the widely translated novels A Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf, 2013), a New York Times Editor’s Choice Book, and the editor of Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015). She is the recipient of many awards, including the JH Kafka prize winner for fiction by an American Woman. Her writing appears internationally including in the UK Guardian, the Boston Globe and the New York Times. She blogs for the Huffington Post on Literature and Politics.
TOP 5 FINALISTS IN NON-FICTION:
“We Who Are About to Die Salute You” by Caroline Bremford
“Hitler’s Gravy Boat” by Willie David
“Dance Come to Mind” by Cadre Scott-Flaherty
“The Landscape of the Body” by Yoshiko Iwai
“Divided Heart” by Damian Johansson
Luso-American FLAD Fellowship Winners
With special thanks to our partner Fundação Luso-Americana, Disquiet is is proud to offer four fellowships to writers of Luso descent. All winners receive free airfare, accommodation, and tuition for the 2017 Disquiet program in Lisbon.
Iracema Drew
Iracema is from Minas Gerais, Brazil, and upstate NY. She is working on a collection of short stories at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she is getting an MFA in Fiction, and a certificate in Literary Translation.
Manuel Igrejas
Manuel Igrejas is Known in theater as the longtime publicist for Blue Man Group, among many other innovative artists, Igrejas has written fiction included in Men on Men 4 and poetry included in A New Geography of Poets. His plays include Shrinkage, Kitty and Lina, (a Portuguese translation of the play is included in the anthology, “Nem Ca, Nem La”). His Miss Mary Dugan and Hassan and Sylvia won the Best Play Awards at the 2010 and 2011 Fresh Fruit Festivals and two best acting awards, Margarita and Max was named Best Short Play in 2013 Midtown Festival. Miss Mary Dugan, Hassan and Sylvia Margarita and Max and NSA are available at www.indietheaternow.com. NSA, was an O’Neill semi-finalist 2013 and earned good reviews in its Stage Left Studio run, July-August 2014. Other plays include Chantal, Doofus and Pittsburgh! www.mannyigrejas.com.
Marybeth Rua-Larsen
Marybeth Rua-Larsen lives on the south coast of Massachusetts and teaches at Bristol Community College. Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in American Arts Quarterly, Measure, The Raintown Review, Cleaver and The Cape Cod Poetry Review, among others. She won the 2011 Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Competition for Poetry in Galway, Ireland and the 2016 Parent-Writer Fellowship in Poetry from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between was published by Barefoot Muse Press in 2014.
Randall Silvis
Randall Silvis’s fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction have appeared on Best of the Year lists from the New York Times, the Toronto Globe & Mail, SfSite.com, and the International Association of Crime Writers, as well as on several Editor’s and Booksellers’ Pick lists. Silvis’s multi-genre work has been hailed as “masterful” not only by the New York Times Book Review, but also by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Mystery Scene magazine, and has been translated into several languages. Also a prize-winning playwright, produced screenwriter, and prolific essayist, Randall Silvis’s literary awards include the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, two literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award, and a Doctor of Letters degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania for “distinguished literary achievement.”
Luso-American FLAD Fellowship Finalists
Cristina Baptista
Brielle Ferreira
Edgar Garbeletto
Desirée Jung
Maria Meindl
Paula Neves
Mary Serradas