Winners of the Fourteenth Annual Robert and Adele Schiff Awards
Thomas Dodson for his story “The Watchman”
chosen by Michael Griffith
L. I. Henley for her essay “On the Subject of Bearing and ‘Other Options'”
chosen by Jerald Walker
Caroline Harper New for her poem “Notes on Devotion”
chosen by Rebecca Lindenberg
Thank you to everyone who entered our contest this year! We appreciated you sending your poems, stories, and essays our way.
Dodson, Henley, and New will each receive a $1,000 prize, and their pieces will appear in the Spring 2023 issue of The Cincinnati Review. Read more below about the inspiration behind their work!
We also want to recognize all the honorable mentions:
Emma Binder
Xinni Chen
Khanh Ha
Nafisa A. Iqbal
Mitchell Jacobs
Anu Kandikuppa
Patricia Grace King
Katie Knoll
D. E. Lee
Péter Moesko, translated by Walter Burgess and Marietta Morry
Gwen Niekamp
Lara Palmqvist
C. Samuel Rees
Danie Shokoohi
Natalie Louise Tombasco
Lastly, we’d like to thank our readers Lisa Low, Lily Meyer, and Connor Yeck for their assistance during this year’s contest period.
“The Watchman” by Thomas Dodson
Fiction Editor Michael Griffith: Thomas Dodson’s “The Watchman” is wonderfully unfussy—elegant, smart, compact. Many, many writers have been defeated by the challenge of writing an addiction story that feels fresh and vivid, but Dodson, through subtle psychology and clever use of ghost-story tropes, here accomplishes it beautifully.
Dodson on his winning story: Most of my stories begin with something I find intriguing but don’t know much about: bee heists, for example, or earthquakes caused by fracking, or the lives of drone pilots. For these, I typically end up doing a lot of research.
My process for this story was different, though. I was between projects and going through my notebooks, the place where I jot down odd experiences, snatches of conversations overheard, family lore, anecdotes shared by people at dive bars—some of the best places I know of for exchanging stories with strangers.
“The Watchman” draws from all of these sources, but also from the light in certain photographs by Gregory Crewdson, the ending of the short film La Jetée, and the stripped-down prose style in Jess Walter’s “Anything Helps.” I remember one reader at Iowa said that she thought this story felt “haunted by hope.” I like this description, would like to believe that the story is ultimately hopeful about the possibility of healing and human connection while still remaining clear-eyed about the difficulties of experiencing isolation, overcoming addiction, facing up to past mistakes, and, well, just being a person in the world.
Thomas Dodson is an assistant professor and librarian at Southern Oregon University. His fiction has appeared in Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His story “Keeping” was awarded the 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. He holds graduate degrees from the Ohio State University, Kent State University, and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Ashland, Oregon, by the grace of the hoofed ruminant mammals that are its rightful overlords.
“On the Subject of Bearing and ‘Other Options” by L. I. Henley
Guest Literary Nonfiction Editor Jerald Walker: “On the Subject of Bearing and Other Options” is a beautifully written and wonderfully complex critique of the paternalistic tendencies that characterize the medical profession and, by extension, society at large. An essay as compelling as it is timely.
Henley on her winning essay: “On Bearing and Other Options” is the penultimate essay from a collection-in-progress that covers a ten-year stretch of time, beginning with the onset of debilitating, mysterious illness and leaving off with my current state of managing a trifecta of autoimmune diseases. This essay required many drafts as it attempted to telescope between macro and micro: the global pandemic, the fires cresting my town, a regional rabbit virus, the pain in my pelvis. Memoir always involves personal risk—will I be exposed? Share too much, the wrong thing? Can I really talk about that? Using humor helps me say the serious things that need to be said. Humor and pointing to nature—to what is beautiful and what is suffering in the natural world, which we share—are my guide rails as I write what might feel unmentionable.
L.I. Henley was born and raised in the Mojave Desert of California. A mixed-media artist and writer, she is the author of many books including Starshine Road, which won the 2017 Perugia Press Prize, and the novella-in-verse Whole Night Through (What Books Press, 2019). Her art, poetry, and prose have appeared most recently in The Adroit Journal, Brevity, Indianapolis Review, Waxwing, Diode, Tupelo Quarterly, Ninth Letter, and Los Angeles Review. Her personal essays have been awarded national recognition including the Arts & Letters/Susan Atefat Prize in 2020. She is the creator of Paper Dolls & Books, a series where Henley creates jointed paper dolls that express the essence of her favorite poetry books. Visit her at www.lihenley.com and follow her on Instagram @lihenleyart.
“Notes on Devotion” by Caroline Harper New
Poetry Editor Rebecca Lindenberg: “Notes on Devotion” operates almost like the clockwork or other mechanicals it mentions, different gears turning into each other—the idea of conditioning, that of love and the inescapability of loss, the nature of ritual, and what can (and can’t) interrupt all of these things—clicking into place by sound and association. Or another mechanical analogy: it moves like a combination lock tumbling into place to release. The poem is intricate, uncanny, heartaching, and almost infinitely rereadable.
New on her winning poem: B. F. Skinner set out to discover what matters beyond hunger, beyond logic. In this way, his efforts were no different than those of poetry—to feed, observe, pry apart, repeat, until something makes sense. Likewise, his study of pigeons, an attempt to understand people, quickly turned into an instrument of destruction.
This poem felt like an experiment in itself. The driving question: What does devotion have to do with love? When writing of love, I often turn to science, fascinated by these human endeavors to make sense of ourselves. When writing of pain, I turn to the animal. The animal, being both multitudinous and alive, becomes a dynamic symbol—it bears every moment of interaction, from empathy to disgust, pity to awe. For me, the pigeon became a tool through which I could probe the harrowing depths of devotion but also be kind to myself in the wake of its vise.
Caroline Harper New is a poet and visual artist from southwest Georgia. Her work is rooted in the Gulf Coast and grounded in an academic background in anthropology. New is a currently on a Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where she also serves as the Dzanc Writer-in-Residence. Her poetry has been featured Southern Humanities Review, PRISM International, and Ruminate, and is forthcoming in the American Poetry Review. Find more at www.carolineharpernew.com.
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