New Works Competition
Winner:
Alle C. Hall “My 70’s Avatar”
Runner Up:
Michael Schmeltzer “To Catch an Avatar”
Honorable Mentions:
Nicholas Goman “Nesting”
Anji Reyner “Attainment”
Geri Gale “Avatar of a Lesbian”
Since its inception Hugo House has offered a yearly writing contest, the New Works Competition. For the past two years, the competition has been tied to the fourth and final event of the Hugo Literary Series. This seems fitting, since the impetus behind the Literary Series is to promote the creation of new work by commissioning writers to write on assigned themes. Some of our invited guests love responding to a specific subject and a deadline; others are more resistant at first. In the end, the writers who participate in the Hugo Literary Series are generally amazed and delighted at where their subject takes them. What amazes and delights us is how different three pieces of writing on the same theme can be.
The same is true of those writers who entered our New Works Competition this year. We received poems, essays, short stories, prose poems and more. Writers examined the theme of avatars through the lens of sexuality, family relations, adolescence, eco-terrorism, superheroes and body parts. Entries ranged from just a few dozen words to several hundred. We were thrilled to see so many people respond to an esoteric prompt, and our panel of judges had a difficult time winnowing down a strong field to just five finalists.
Our panel comprised our four writers-in-residence, Ed Skoog, Angela Jane Fountas, Storme Webber and Cienna Madrid; and longtime Hugo House teacher Anne Leigh Parrish. The five finalists were then sent on to our final judge, Brian Turner, an award-winning poet, teacher and an invited writer at last year’s Hugo Literary Series event, “We Could Be Heroes.”
Brian Turner had an even more difficult time choosing just one piece out of the five stellar entries we sent him. In the end, however, he did, and the results are below. Congratulations to all the finalists in the 2009 New Works Competition, and many thanks to everyone who entered.
