Our 2023 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction Winners!
Dappled Things is pleased to name the winners of our 2023 J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction. Our editors have chosen these four stories from hundreds of submissions, and look forward to sharing them with you in upcoming issues of Dappled Things. We are grateful to all who sent us their best short fiction, demonstrating the range and depth narrative achieves in its most compressed form all while keeping "one foot in this world and one in the next."
Here are our four winners and what judges had to say about their stories:
First Place Winner
“The Least” by Brian Sutton: This contemporary parable’s realism, distilled into intoxicatingly strong concentration, is best enjoyed at the cliff’s edge of allegory. This page-turner stood out for the swift pacing and keen urgency with which it offers us a new, and doubtless very different, Misfit-Grandmother pairing. Not to be missed.
Runner-Up
“The Donut Swamp” S.M. Stubbs: This funny, tender story turns first meditative and then deadly serious without losing a scrap of its comedic verve. Its characters invite reflection on the moral valences of seemingly quotidian acts: how we might embody kindness, competence, and protection when we are way out of our depth, and how we might show up for those others whose lives we can only ever partially understand.
Honorable Mentions
“Bridges Rarely Crossed” by Fletcher Michael: Making use of the classic chiasmus pattern, this wild yarn achieves its effect of peripeteia and reversal within a sticky situation among privileged New York students. The prose successfully evokes the ennui of envy and the thrill of genuine kindness, resulting in a substitutionary atonement that the likes of Whit Stillman or Wes Anderson might delight to film.
“The Penitent” by Chimezie Chika: Who are we to understand as “the penitent” of this story’s title? Might the name slide from one character to another, as circumstances change? And how are we to understand the bitter epiphany with which the story ends? The bleak, scouring, but elegant prose provides strong medicine against the notion that we could ever strike any lasting compromise between Christ and concupiscence, or carry out any self-consistent intention without the help of grace.
The 2024 J. F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction Contest will open for submissions Oct 1, 2024.
