Schiff Award Winners

Hear ye, hear ye! (Because we stopped the government to create the appropriate drama for the following announcement.) The winners of 2013’s Robert and Adele Schiff Awards are (musical flourish, swirly-yet-sweeping arm gesture):

Karrie Higgins for “The Bottle City of God” (Prose)

and

Martha Silano for “The World” (Poetry)

Of course, we received many wonderfully well-crafted entries, which included everything from an aquarium octopus inspiring a mother’s breakdown, a cuckolded factory worker plotting revenge with a chorus of advising worker voices, a child gang-war involving the thieving of shoes, an essay charting personal history via perfume, a lyrical memoir of huffing aerosol cans and jumping off ledges with a dangerous friend, a short story starring a character named “shit weasel,” a lyrical essay on the odds of getting cancer, as well as poems about gun-happy grandmothers, lilacs from Mars, sky burial, mall zombies, and the thought processes of worms. Entrants, you have our gratitude for supporting our endeavor and for sharing your poems, stories, and essays with us.

Read on for the editors’ comments on their winning selections, as well as a list of runners up.

Don Bogen: I was surprised and delighted to discover that the author of this year’s Schiff Award–winning poem, “The World,” is our contributor Martha Silano. What drew me to “The World,” after the over-the-top boldness of its title—and the subject of the poem is, indeed, the whole world—was its musical exuberance. The long-lined couplets zoom along on the energies of their shifting references (everything from cormorants to volcanoes, from an Xbox to the Seine, in a dazzling Nerudan sweep), their intricate rhythms, and phrases that light up both the imagination and the tongue: “conundrum/ drum imbued with the screwy,” “our rutabaga dumbness,” “the feline of reinvention.” Not to mention a mathematical equation (I’m not sure how our typesetters will handle that one) and a closing phrase—“frosty, flanged, fecund”—that is not afraid to pull out all the stops. The whole poem, in fact, is fearless, with an appetite as vast as its subject and the craft to match.

Michael Griffith: “The Bottle City of God” is a sharp-minded, nimble, thoughtful essay that manages to be both wide-ranging—set in Salt Lake City, it takes up issues of Mormonism, city planning, cricket plagues, the end-times and their role in LDS theology, jaywalking, graffiti about jaywalking, anti-religious prejudice, temperature inversions and air pollution—and deeply personal. Karrie Higgins meditates poignantly and with a luminous intelligence on what it is and means to live in Salt Lake City as a non-Mormon, on what it means to breathe Zion’s strange air. This is a marvelous essay about what can be assimilated, about both the literal and the metaphorical ways that we take into ourselves the places we live.

BD Feil Leslie Parry