2017 Nonfiction Award Winner, Chosen by Elena Passarello Liz Asch The apartment we’ve rented for the remainder of our stay in New York is on the fifteenth floor, with a perfect view of the...
Ander Monson Things keep happening outside my screen. In 1993 the Michigan Militia guy I work with in Electronics at Walmart tries to recruit me—unsuccessfully. The video he showed me does...
Nick Kowalczyk That Tuesday morning I awoke with an aching body and yellow shit clumped around my eyes and caked across my temples like two dried-out streams during a summer drought. It was...
Ander Monson No one talks enough about how Schwarzenegger looks on-screen. Or how his face is lit in every shot: one sees what California did in him to make him governor. In 1987 I would have...
Brenda Miller and Julie Marie Wade My brother-in-law, who flies planes for a living, tells me that no one can die in the sky. “But people die everywhere,” I protest. “That’s the...
Betty Rosen I learned “city” from Cleveland and its drone of heart-rot, clotting-rust hopelessness. I still read in its script of nostalgia. Its bridges crash down into silver water,...
Steven Church Fort Collins, CO 1999 Where’s the baby? I called out in the dark. Half asleep, I sat up in bed. Where’s the baby? I asked again. I’d been troubled recently...
Jill Talbot and Justin Lawrence Daugherty i. North Country For a while I lived along the Canadian border. Never crossed it, though it felt like it on snowy nights I’d settle into corner...
Melissa Wiley Closer to Honey There were gold veins on her ceiling. If not gold, amber then, something resembling resin. They once were blue, the same as everyone else’s. Only so many years...
Belle Boggs My mother had marked the offending date on the calendar with a dark cloud and two jagged bolts of lightning. Raindrops fell from the eighth to the other days of the month—the...