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{"id":2212,"date":"2020-08-23T09:45:06","date_gmt":"2020-08-23T09:45:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/?p=2212"},"modified":"2020-08-23T10:12:02","modified_gmt":"2020-08-23T10:12:02","slug":"announcing-winners-2020-insider-prize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/?p=2212&lang=ar","title":{"rendered":"Announcing the Winners of the 2020 Insider Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"

ASF mag announces this year’s winners of the Insider Prize<\/p>\n

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For the last three years, Austin literary magazine <\/span>American Short Fiction<\/em><\/strong> <\/a><\/span>(ASF) has sponsored a contest for incarcerated writers in Texas. A group of writers at the Connally Unit, in Kenedy, Texas, came up with the name: The Insider Prize. Each year ASF receives dozens of essays and short stories from men and women in prisons and jails across the state, some handwritten and others produced on typewriters. They tell stories about their lives before prison, about the conditions inside, and about the many places their imaginations take them. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In April, as ASF prepared to share the good news with the winners and finalists, they learned that finalist Timothy Bazrowx had died at a prison hospital after testing positive for COVID-19. He was sixty-three. Through three books and countless shorter pieces, according to ASF, Bazrowx had cultivated an \u201cincisive, vivid, and frequently hilarious style, which he didn\u2019t abandon even as his home became a deathtrap.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Bazrowx wrote to one correspondent that in prison, \u201csickness runs like a crazy horse through a flower bed.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The winners of this year\u2019s Insider Prizes were selected by guest judge Justin Torres, whose award-winning 2011 novel We the Animals <\/em>has proven popular among writers behind bars. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the fiction category, Torres selected \u201cThat Place on Daniel Island\u201d by F. R. Martinez. Martinez also won in the fiction category last year, when Joyce Carol Oates selected his story \u201cMother\u2019s Son.\u201d This new piece is told entirely in dialogue, and Torres wrote that it \u201cfeels so alive, to not just the syntax and rhythms of everyday speech, but also to the very need for dialogue itself. Talking is a way to both dig up trouble and put it to rest. The two characters are talking from two very different sides of a shared experiences\u2014marriage, incarceration\u2014and the effect is quite moving.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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In the memoir category, Torres selected \u201cThe Promise\u201d by Steven Perez. \u201cWhat I loved most about this piece,\u201d Torres wrote, is \u201cthat the story moves beyond the narrative of the gruesome attack that serves as the inciting incident to raise important questions about witnessing, responsibility, codes of conduct, failed guardianship\u2014all the systemic issues that foster and allow for prison violence. It is tremendously well written.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The memoir runner-up this year was \u201cMy Time Paradox,\u201d by Jacob Jills, which Torres called a \u201creal achievement in prose style\u201d that \u201cprovoked an eerie claustrophobic feeling while reading.\u201d The fiction runner-up this year was \u201cClassic Rock,\u201d by John Rodgers, which Torres called \u201ctroubling, funny, and hazed with a kind of dreamlike nostalgia.\u201d <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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All of the winning stories can be read here: <\/span><\/span>https:\/\/americanshortfiction.org\/new\/announcing-the-2020-winners-of-the-insider-prize\/<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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