We're thrilled to announce the following winners and runners-up of the 2012 Iowa Review Awards. These stories, essays, and poems will appear in our December 2012 issue. Thanks to all who entered!
Fiction
Winner: Kyle Minor, "Seven Stories About Kenel of Koulèv-Ville"
Runner-up: Emily Martin, "Claude Piron Beholds His Beloved"
Fiction judge Ron Currie, Jr., on his choices: "My tastes tend toward the dark, and 'Seven Stories' is genuinely beautiful shadow play, a fever dream of humanity caught in the grip of catastrophes both natural and man-made. It succeeds at that most difficult of narrative tricks—the nearly impossible task of creating, in a few short pages, a whole world for the reader to inhabit. One feels black magic lurking in the margins of this story. It reads like a fable, but the people who inhabit it are quite real, and their tragedies and dark humor are deeply affecting. And what a strange and wonderful story ['Claude Piron'] is, a kaleidoscopic, staccato narrative that at first baffles, then slowly and expertly begins to reveal its secrets and more importantly its heart, to the reader."
Nonfiction
Winner: Bernadette Esposito, "The Principle of the Fragility of Good Things"
Runner-up: Marcela Sulak, "Getting a Get"
"'The Principle of the Fragility of Good Things,' reflects judge Meghan Daum, "combines research, rumination, and existential inquiry into a thought-provoking pastiche. I appreciate the way the author strikes a balance between dispassionate reporting and deep human feeling. 'Getting a Get' is sad, funny, and relatable, even to those who've never gotten a get (or don't get what a get is!) I found the author charming and real, with a voice that seems to speak directly to the reader."
Poetry
Winner: Emily Hunt, "Figure the Color of the Wave She Watched," "As Long as Relief," "View from a Regular Fantasy," "Another Time Stopped," "Last Night of the Year We Remembered Our Desires"
Runner-up: Aditi Machado, "The Animal," "Essay," "Walk Through Eucalyptus Lane"
Ron Currie, Jr., is the author of God Is Dead, winner of the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf award, and Everything Matters!, winner of an Alex Award from the American Library Association.
Meghan Daum is a noted essayist and the author of three books, most recently the memoir Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House. Since 2005, she has been an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
Timothy Donnelly, TIR Awards poetry judge, is the author of Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit and The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is the poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches in the writing program of Columbia University's School of the Arts.
