[img_assist|nid=10792|title=Che|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=81|height=100]Philadelphia Stories, a non-profit literary magazine featuring the work of writers and artists from the Delaware Valley, has chosen Che Yeun, a graduate from the University of Pennsylvania and M.F.A. candidate at the University of New Orleans, as the winner for its fifth annual Marguerite McGlinn National Prize for Fiction.
Board members whittled more than 450 stories down to 10 finalists, which were reviewed by celebrated author and 2013 judge, Michael Martone. He chose Yeun’s “One in Ten Fish Are Afraid of Water,” praising the author for creating a story that “embodies, dramatizes, and transports osmosis and the permeable movement through boundaries and borders formally, in its content, and with its characters. The story is about betwixt and between, and its author handles all of the transgressions, transitions, and transmogrifications with grace and grit.”
First prize includes a $2,000 cash award, an invitation to an awards dinner, and publication in the Fall 2013 issue of Philadelphia Stories.
[img_assist|nid=10797|title=Annam|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=75]This year’s second place winner is Annam Manthiram, author of the novel, After the Tsunami, which was a Finalist in the 2010 SFA Fiction Contest and in the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards.
Martone says of Manthiram’s story, “The Rules of Mending”: “I like the ambition here, the sweep of time and place, all figuratively and literally stitched together by the rhetoric of advice and the X-Acto knife of collage.”
Yeun will be honored at an awards dinner to be held at Rosemont College on Friday, October 11, 2012, followed by Philadelphia Stories’ annual Push to Publish Conference on Saturday October 12, 2013. The conference will be held for the sixth year on the campus of Rosemont College, which offers an MFA in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Publishing, and has actively supported the writing community through events like Push to Publish.
ABOUT THE WINNING AUTHORS
Che Yeun earned her B.A. in History & Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on biomedical ethics. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of New Orleans, and the Stanley Elkin Scholarship recipient for the 2013 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her short fiction received the 2012 Enizagam Literary Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in The Pinch, Enizagam and Kartika Review. She is working on a collection of short stories, and documents her travels (real and imaginary) on www.koriental.com.
Annam Manthiram is the author of the novel, After the Tsunami (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011), which was a Finalist in the 2010 SFA Fiction Contest and in the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and a short story collection (Dysfunction: Stories, Aqueous Books, 2012), which was a Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Contest and in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 Fiction Contest.
About Marguerite McGlinn
Marguerite McGlinn was the essay editor of Philadelphia Stories from 2004-2008. Her travel stories appeared in the New York Times, the Sun-Sentinel, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times. She edited The Trivium: The LiberalArts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric (Paul Dry Books, 2002). Three of her short stories won places in “Writing Aloud,” a program of dramatic readings that matches contemporary fiction with professional actors. She was an adjunct instructor at Saint Joseph University in Philadelphia, and her story “The Sphinx” appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of Philadelphia Stories and the second volume of the Best of Philadelphia Stories (2009).
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