Winners of the 2011 BLOOM Chapbook Contest Announced

April 12, 2012—BLOOM is pleased to announce the winners of its 2011 Chapbook Contest.  All winners will receive a $100 honorarium, along with 25 copies of their chapbook, which will be published in October 2012. Judges and guidelines for the 2012 contest have just been published on www.artsinbloom.com.

POETRY WINNER

“The Way I’ll Leave You” by Jill Leininger, selected by Mark Doty

 Judge Mark Doty observed, “This fresh, livewire collection introduces a distinctive new voice, a deeply ingratiating speaker who's flirtatious, tender, knowing, tough enough to get by but not too tough to avoid getting her heart broken. In these poems love is gorgeous, slippery, and hard to live in. Here, Jill Leininger tells us, 'More than one woman is crying. Come to the liquid edge...see our wings span the city...I bet you've never loved a bird like us. We're so beautiful, it hurts'."


A 2011 Lambda Literary Fellow, Jill Leininger's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in cream city review, Poetry International, and the Harvard Review Online. “Roof Picnic Skies, New York,” a chapbook of prose poems, was also published by dancing girl press in February 2012. Photo by Pat Cassidy Mollach.

NONFICTION WINNER

“States of Independence” by Michael Klein, selected by Rigoberto Gonzalez

Judge Rigoberto González observed, “States of Independence gathers the cultural expressions of literature, cinema, art, architecture, dance and even religious ceremony in order to illuminate how all creative artifact is, at its core, a testament to human mortality. The most recognized masterpieces, Klein shows us, are but mirrors of the everyday person’s unacknowledged emotions and unfulfilled desires--gestures of beauty no less valuable because they’re silent or secretive. By turns poetic and elegiac, these wondrous reflections invite the reader ‘to love the world of what is here and what departs the world; to experience sadness without reaching for a solution to sadness; to join the sadness’.”

Michael Klein's first book of poems, 1990, received a Lambda Literary Award in 1993 and his second book of poems, then, we were still living was a finalist for the award in 2011. His new book of poems, The Talking Day (Sibling Rivalry Press), will come out in June, 2013. His poems and nonfiction have appeared in Bloom, Poets & Writer, Tin House, The New England Review, Fence, Ploughshares, Post Road, Ocean State Review and many other publications. He teaches in the low-residency program at Goddard College in Vermont and has been part of the summer faculty who teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was a Fellow in 1990. He lives in New York and Provincetown with the lovely animals, Cyrus and Ruby, and the lovely human, Andrew.

FICTION WINNER

“Ladies” by A. Naomi Jackson, selected by Nina Revoyr

Judge Nina Revoyr observed, ““Ladies” is a wonder of a story.  It effortlessly bridges countries and generations, time frames and points of view. Featuring rich, precise language and beautiful imagery, it touches on themes of colonialism, gender, and social mobility.  But ultimately it’s a love story, and what a romance it is—full of humor and heart, longing and loss, with an ending that’s both redemptive and heartbreaking.”

A. Naomi Jackson was born and raised in Brooklyn by West Indian parents. She is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She traveled to South Africa on a Fulbright scholarship, where she received an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town. A graduate of Williams College, her work has appeared in Coon Bidness, Encyclopedia, Obsidian, The Caribbean Writer, and Sable. She has been a resident at Hedgebrook and received the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker scholarship at the Fine Arts Work Center. She co-founded the Tongues Afire creative writing workshop in 2006.


HONORABLE MENTIONS

"Quality Time" by Lewis DeSimone of San Francisco, CA (fiction)

 “Lost in the Labyrinths of Lust” by Eduardo A. Febles of Dedham, MA (nonfiction)

“There is Nothing We May Call Our Own in a Union That is But a Dream”
by Wayne Johns of Greensboro, NC (poetry)

“The Littlest Death” by TC Tolbert of Tucson, AZ (poetry)

For more information, email queerarts@gmail.com or visit www.artsinbloom.com.