Winners of the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize

Dappled Things is very pleased to announce the winners of the 2020 J.F. Powers Prize for short fiction that has "one foot in this world and one in the next."

1st place, "A Fire in the Hills" by Sally Thomas
Runner-up, "Remission" by Gloria Whelan
Honorable Mentions, "Open House" by Jennifer Donahue and "Unfinished Business" by Rob Davidson

Dappled Things fiction editor Natalie Morrill has the following words about our winners:

Sally Thomas's "A Fire in the Hills" was a standout submission in the midst of a very strong long list, both in terms of its literary quality, and in terms of its honest engagement with the narrator's trauma. The narrator's voice, as well as her deft use of point-of-view shifts and non-linear narrative structure to engage with and complicate our sense of who she is, read as the authentic record of a wise and introspective, yet conflicted, woman. The characters in this story, and its protagonist in particular, come across as vivid and complex, wrestling with the meaning of their own sins and scars even as they fumble towards wholeness (and holiness). Longer short stories (this one is over 7500 words) need to be able to justify their length, and this is one piece we would not wish any shorter.

"Remission" by Gloria Whelan, our runner up, has its own set of strengths, and is a marvelous little story that seems perfectly suited to the criteria of this competition. This simple but rich account of an aging priest on holiday near the end of his life reads, as one of our judges put it, as if it "could have been written by Powers himself... if Powers had had a better hand with women characters." A delight!

Our honorable mentions are "Open House" by Jennifer Donahue and "Unfinished Business," by Rob Davidson. Coincidentally, both these stories deal with complex and broken family relationships, all of which come to a head towards the climax of each story. While the one touches on suicide, teen pregnancy, and disability, and the other on divorce and dementia, both of these stories stood out to our judges as deeply compassionate and deftly handled presentations of the moments of luminosity and grace we can receive even in the most confusing and hopeless-seeming relationships.