We received so many amazing pieces of writing for this year’s contest. We’re excited and honoured to announce the winners of this year’s Creative Nonfiction Contest, as selected by Jonathan Kemp! You can read all three pieces in our Winter issue 57.2, so be sure to pick up a copy!
Grand Prize Winner
“How to Dig a Ditch” by Antonia Crane (Los Angeles, California)
Antonia Crane is the author of the memoir, “Spent.” She’s a sex worker, professor and activist in Los Angeles. She has written for The New York Times, The Believer, The Toast, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Salon.com, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, DAME, The Establishment, The Los Angeles Review, Quartz, Medium.com, and lots of other places. She wrote and produced episode “POPPY” for the scripted web series DRIVEN. Her screenplay “The Lusty” (co-written by Transparent director, Silas Howard), based on the true story of the exotic dancer’s union, is a recipient of the San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Grant in screenwriting.
First Runner-Up
“It Wasn’t Weakness” by Emily Casali (Langley, British Columbia)
Emily Casali is a Canadian writer from Airdrie, Alberta. Her nonfiction was longlisted for the 2017 CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize and her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Huffington Post, Motherly, and Parent.co. Emily has wrestled a giant octopus while working as a deckhand on a fishing boat, been stranded in Guatemala after a volcanic eruption, and has witnessed the births of many babies in her work as a doula. She currently works from home as a freelance writer. She and her husband are expecting their third child in February 2019
Second Runner-Up
“Feral” by Kat Savino (Brooklyn, New York)
Kat Savino is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist who holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Narratively, Apogee, DIAGRAM, the Los Angeles Review, Marie Claire, and Adrienne: a poetry journal of queer women, among other publications. In 2011, she was a recipient of A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize in Poetry. Over the last decade, she has taught writing and worked as a writing consultant at various colleges in the New York City area. She currently works at Baruch College, Hebrew Union-JIR, and The CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. She is writing a memoir.
Dr Jonathan Kemp’s (@JonathanMKemp) debut novel London Triptych (Myriad, 2010) was acclaimed by The Guardian as an “ambitious, fast-moving, and sharply written work” and by Time Out as “a thoroughly absorbing and pacy read.” It was shortlisted for the inaugural Green Carnation Prize and won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2011. He teaches creative writing at Birkbeck College. A story collection, Twentysix was published by Myriad in November 2011, followed by a second novel, Ghosting, in March 2015. His first book of non-fiction, The Penetrated Male, was published by Punctum Books in 2012, with a second, Homotopia? Gay Identity, Sameness & the Politics of Desire in 2016.