2018 Winner Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize – Marci Vogel
Website: marcivogel.com
Death and Other Holidays is published by Melville House.
“The prose is stunning: never overwrought for so intense a subject, flowing yet specific, quiet and lovely,” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review.
“Beautifully conceived and beautifully executed. Marci Vogel is an artist in complete control of her materials,” -Percival Everett, author of So Much Blue.
“Told with a great good humor and underlying affection for all its characters, Death and Other Holidays, winner of the Miami Book Fair / de Groot Prize, announces a brilliant and assured new voice in American fiction.” ~Melville House
Vogel’s poetry, prose, translations, and cross-genre inventions appear in Jacket2, VIDA, Quarter After Eight, and FIELD. She has a doctorate in creative writing and literature from the University of Southern California and is the recipient of a Willis BarnstoneTranslation Prize, and the inaugural Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize for her collection, At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody.
2018 Runners-up
Branden Boyer-White
Branden Boyer-White is a runner-up for Dice, a magic realist tale of a man caught at the crossroads in his marriage and life. Branden’s fiction has appeared in Hunger Mountain, Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, and Anthropoid, among other places.
Website: brandenboyerwhite.com
photo credit: Lex Ryan
Holly Takashima has been an educator for the past decade. She has taught in New Orleans, Estes Park, Nashville, Houston, and Los Angeles. She loves working with young people and helping them grow into themselves.
The Meaning of Words is the story of Claire Kimura, a fifteen years old and waiting for high school to end. She doesn’t know how to explain things she’s only beginning to understand, so she stops trying, retreats, and emerges a year later to find herself changed in small and imperceptible ways. This is a story about growing up and coming into your own consciousness, and about how sometimes, it takes silence and solitude to return to the world.
Niki Tulk
Niki Tulk’s novella Before Rain, is set in the Australian Outback, where a man is building an ark for an apocalypse of its own making. Niki is from Australia and lives in Boulder Colorado, where she teaches, writes and creates experimental theatre. Her work has appeared in Emergency Index, The Saranac Review, Rock River Review, and more.
Website: nikitulk.com