Photo provided by Tom Rankin
Award Winner ($300): Those That Dig, Those That Break by Robert Maynor
Second Prize ($50): Invisible by J.J. White
Third Prize ($50): Irish Exits by Charles Booth
Finalist: A Silent Breeze by Sam Gridley
Finalist: Grown-up Party by Jody Hobbs Hesler
2018 Guest Judge: Silas House
Photo by Tasha Thomas
Silas House is the nationally bestselling author of five novels—Clay’s Quilt, 2001; A Parchment of Leaves, 2003; The Coal Tattoo, 2005; Eli the Good, 2009; and Same Sun Here (co-authored with Neela Vaswani) 2012—as well as a book of creative nonfiction—Something’s Rising, co-authored with Jason Howard, 2009; and three plays: The Hurting Part (2005), This Is My Heart for You (2012), and In These Fields, with Sam Gleaves, 2016.
His work frequently appears in The New York Times and Salon. He is former commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered”. His writing has appeared in Oxford American, Narrative, Blackbird, Newsday, as well as in anthologies such as Best Food Writing, 2015 and New Stories From the South, The Year’s Best: 2004. House serves on the fiction faculty at the Spalding MFA in Creative Writing and as the NEH Chair at Berea College.
He is the recipient of three honorary doctorates and is the winner of the Nautilus Award, an EB White Award, the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Jesse Stuart Award, the Lee Smith Award, and many other honors.
