At the end of each year, The Iowa Review editor and staff choose, from all the work published in our pages over the previous year, a piece that we think most fits the comic spirit of 1986 contributor Tim McGinnis, who, as David Hamilton explained in his December 2009 editor’s note,

… grew up in north central Illinois, flatter land than Iowa, to become a writer in New York from where he sent us a three-page story, “The Trail,” about a distracted Kafka on a hike at Boy Scout Camp, and as it had in fact been a while since we’d run anything on Kafka’s scouting days, as his two-and-a-half line cover letter reminded us, we placed it first in an issue over twenty years ago to learn, a couple of years later, that McGinnis, not yet forty, had died of a brain tumor; the news came when his family approached us to sponsor an award in his name, for he had been especially pleased by our acceptance of his work, over the transom as the saying goes, what we have been here for most when we are at our best…

We first announced the McGinnis Award in our Spring-Summer 1989 issue and have awarded prizes most years since. Winners now receive $2,000 and mention in our December issue. 

 

We are grateful to the family of Tim McGinnis for sponsoring this award for the past 36 years.

Inspiration for the prize

Tim McGinnis, “The Trail” (16/2, Fall 1986)

Past winners

2024: Katherine Gibbel, “The Salubrious Poem” (54/1)
2023: Chris Nelson, “The Club” (53/1)
2022: Katherine Damm, “The Happiest Day of Your Life” (52/2 & 52/3)

2021: Aleyna Rentz, “The Glenn Gould Memorial Museum” (51/1)

2020: Daniel Paul, “The Apotheosis of RICKY” (50/2)

2019: Belal Rafiq, “Wedding Survival Handbook” (49/2)

2018: Christina Milletti, “Twelve Inches” (48/2)

2017: Amber Dermont, “So What If I Love You That’s None of Your Business” (47/3)

2016: Ruth Madievsky, “Hamster” (46/2)

2015: Dan Hoyt, “The Best White Rapper in Berea, Ohio” (45/1)

2014: Dinika M. Amaral, “No Good Deed Unpunished” (44/3)

2013: Jennifer Bowen Hicks, “Old News, Unverified” (43/3)

2012: Ramon Isao, “Rod Stewart Is Everywhere” (42/3)

2011: Bradley Bazzle, “Magellan” (41/3)

2010: Saint James Harris Wood, “Rabble Letters” (40/2)

2009: Sharma Shields, “The McGugle Account” (39/3)

2008: Ron Carlson, “Victory at Sea” (38/3) and Jim Barnes, “Five Villanelles” (38/1)

2007: Jean Ross Justice, “Tales from a Family Album: The Justices” (37/1)

2002: David Baker, “Postcards from the Islands” (31/3)

2001: Albert Goldbarth, “Library,” “The Great Ones,” “Apology,” “Astronomy” (29/1 and 30/3) and Steve Tomasula, “C-U See-Me” (30/3)

1999: Sharon Wahl, “Tractatus Logico-Eroticus” (28/2)

1998: Susanne Grabowski, “Indian Food” (27/3)

1997: Eric Miles Williamson, “Hope, Among Other Vices and Virtues” (26/3)

1996: Rochelle Nameroff, “Meditation at Chez Panisse” (25/3)

1995: John Picard, “Sinatra: A Memoir” (24/3)

1992: Jason Blake Keuter, “On Fishing” (22/2)

1991: James Solheim, “The Man Who Measures Animals” and Gloria Jones, accompanying illustrations (20/2)

1990: M.R. Axelrod, “PIZD’óSH: Nikolai Gogol, Abner Doubleday, and the Russian Origins of Baseball” (19/3)