We’re ready to bark, howl, chatter, or yip the good news!
Winners of the Tenth Annual Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose
Tori Malcangio for her story “See What I Mean” (chosen by Michael Griffith)
Maggie Millner for her poem “Cherry Valley” (chosen by Rebecca Lindenberg)
Thank you to everyone who submitted to our contest this year! We received so many incredible stories and essays and poems this year—we are grateful for the opportunity to read your beautiful, shocking, weird, sad words.
Malcangio and Millner will each receive $1,000 for their winning pieces, which will appear in the Summer 2019 issue of The Cincinnati Review.
We also want to recognize all the honorable mentions:
Marianne Chan
Paul Curley
Carol Dines
Jessica Hollander
Michael Kaplan
J. P. Kemmick
A. D. Lauren-Abunassar
D. E. Lee
Lawrence Lenhart
Aidan O’Brien
Neil Serven
John Shakespear
Laura Steadham Smith
Laura Walter
Jillian Weiss
We’d also like to thank James Ellenberger, Gwen Kirby, and Molly Reid for their assistance as submission readers during this year’s contest period.
On Tori Malcangio’s “See What I Mean”
Fiction Editor Michael Griffith: “See What I Mean” is a poignant, darkly funny story about a mother dying of cancer who makes matchmaking for her soon-to-be-widowed husband into a kind of bucket-list quest. Behind that plot, Tori Malcangio places a tender, quirky, moving account of the mother’s relationship with her teenaged son, the narrator. A sweet, sharp, surprising story.
Tori Malcangio
Tori Malcangio on her winning story: I was watching trash TV while running at the gym, and this particular host was interviewing swingers. For one couple the arrangement worked wonders: They were communicating more, their sex lives sizzled, their fantasies were getting some attention. For the other couple, however, the experiment proved disastrous, and eventually they divorced.
“Swinging” and how it might fit into the rigid constructs of a traditional marriage set me off on a writing bender, in which a wife simply begins bringing home women. But it was just a swinging story, and also, I wasn’t feeling it from her point of view. So, I gave her a son and flipped the POV. Then, somehow, a years-ago health scare slipped into scene, along with the subsequent fears of leaving kids and husband behind. My “swinging” story lost its Fifty Shades slant, but via the mother in this story, I learned infinitely more about the complicated ways by which we grapple with death, with love, with fear, and with each other’s prejudices of what is normal.
Tori Malcangio lives in San Diego and has an MFA from Bennington College. Stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, ZYZZYVA, Mississippi Review, AGNI online, American Literary Review, River Styx, Tampa Review, and more. She’s received the William Van Dyke Fiction Prize, the American Literary Review Fiction Prize, and the Waasmode Fiction Prize.
On Maggie Millner’s “Cherry Valley”
Poetry Editor Rebecca Lindenberg: “Cherry Valley” really does the work of more than one poem, braiding a remarkably evocative description of place (in this case, a rural place with a pastoral history but a grim-looking future) and a young feminine speaker’s coming-of-age there. The speaker is aware of how the culture of “Cherry Valley” treats (or mistreats) sex, female sexuality, and female bodies—there’s something at once flippant and haunting about it. And perhaps this helps us to understand the formal strategy of the poem, which feels taut and controlled, braced for the recollections it curates. This poem, its tremendous imagery in concert with its matter-of-fact affect and address, hits just the right note, in just the right minor key, and tells us a little something we maybe all need to hear about this slice of Americana so many of our fellow citizens seem ready to romanticize—and gives it to us straight.
Maggie Millner
Maggie Millner on her winning poem: I’m from a very rural part of upstate New York, where the snowplow wrecks the mailbox every winter and the black bears loot my mother’s beehives every spring. I spent thirteen years attending the same one-building public school with the same fifty people, and though I tried pretty desperately for a long time, I never totally felt like I belonged there. I was lucky, though, to have a best friend—a sort of surrogate sister—who experienced it all alongside me: the soccer games, the school dances, the griefs, the drugs, and the first dysfunctional romances. This poem is in many ways an ode to our friendship, which kept me from loneliness for so many years. As I wrote it, nearly a decade after moving away, I found myself revisiting the boredom and alienation I’d felt in this place—the restless unease I was only barely conscious of at the time. I’m honored to have the poem in The Cincinnati Review.
Maggie Millner is a poet from rural upstate New York. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, jubilat, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work on her first collection of poetry and teaches in the Writing Program at Rutgers.
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