We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 Terrain.org Editor’s Prizes, selected by poetry editor Derek Sheffield, nonfiction editor Elizabeth Dodd, fiction editor Pam Houston, and editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin.
One prize of $500 per awardee is given annually in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction for a contribution from the previous year by a writer of color, member of the LGBTQ+ community, woman, and/or member of another marginalized community whose contribution explores place particularly in the context of social, environmental, or climate justice.
Please join us in congratulating these writers—and if you haven’t yet read these powerful and important contributions, read them now!
2024 Winners
Poetry
“The Sheepherder” by Karen Vargas
Tanto hizo el diablo con su hijo, hasta que lo hizo tuerto. / The devil had a son and the more he tried to fix him, the more he fucked him up. / My grandfather used to say this. He usually said it when he was drunk.
Nonfiction
“A Rewilding,” a Letter to America by Christienne L. Hinz
Now, I was raised by a long line of hard-headed Black women who worked close beneath the supervision of the white aristocracy and its terrible critical Gaze. The White Gaze is a bulldozer that crushes the Black soul flat. It compresses our strength to hard-pan. The bulldozing White Gaze scrapes clean away the fertility native to us, packages it, and sells it on the open market where we pay to buy it back.
Fiction
“Thoughts Going Through My Head When You Arrested Me at Walgreens” by Kate Wisel
I call stealing “offsetting” and I’m aware of the fact that I’m fooling myself but isn’t everybody? … Okay, I’ll come clean. Christina wore the black tank top. I wore the white tank top. … I steal because stealing is a feminine art and there is no such thing as morality in art.
About the Winners
Karen Vargas is from northern New Mexico and has lived all over the Wwest. Her poetry and short fiction have been published in Epoch, Borderlore Journal, and others. She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Truman Capote Award, a Plain View Fellowship, and a Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Exchange Fellowship. She attends the Institute of American Indian Arts in the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Christienne L. Hinz is a retired professor of Japanese history, a freelance writer, beekeeper, and Master Gardener. She lives a very full life in southern Illinois with her husband, two children, a dog, and two cats. “A Rewilding” will also be included in the forthcoming Best American Essays.
Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. Her fiction can be found in places that include Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Adroit Journal, The Best Small Fictions 2019, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere. She lives in Milwaukee, works as an assistant to music critic Jim DeRogatis, and teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University.
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