Leapfrog Press :: Fiction Contest

The 2012 Leapfrog Fiction Contest is open for entries from January 15 through May 1, 2012.

We are delighted to announce that our finalist judge this year will be Lev Raphael.

By popular request, we will be including a children's fiction division again, for middle-grade and young adult fiction. Also by popular request, the adult division will be open to science fiction as well as literary and mainstream fiction. Please follow the entry guidelines given below. Any questions on the contest should be sent to fictioncontest@leapfrogpress.com

The contest is for Adult Fiction and Children's Fiction (middle grade an YA only). Any novella- or novel-length work of fiction, including short-story collections, not previously published* is eligible. The minimum length is 22,000 words; there is no maximum length.

* Previously self-published books that have no more than 200 copies in circulation will be considered "unpublished" and may be submitted. Short stories that have been published in literary journals may be included in collections.

Attach your entire manuscript as a single text, Word, or PDF document. Use the title of the manuscript as the file name. Please do not call your file "mybook.doc" or "leapfrog.doc" or "manuscript1.doc" etc., as it will be indistinguishable from the 10s of other submissions so titled. Please do not use your title's initials, as this causes lots of confusion around here.

If illustrations are included, make sure the file size is not greater than 2 MB. If your file is larger than that, please email for instructions on how to send. Note that any images must be black and white.

Manuscript format: we are not picky. Just make it readable. It is important that no personal information be included in the attached file: Please do not put your name or address in the page headers or on a title page. Use only the book's title as identification.

We have lifted the restriction on the number of manuscripts from any one author, since a number of authors wanted to submit multiple manuscripts in the past. Multiple submissions will be judged separately; the judges will not know they are from the same author. Note that we do not encourage more than two manuscripts from one author. Much as we'd love the opportunity to read your additional manuscripts, we encourage authors to submit to multiple contests, and not put all their resources (i.e., contest fees) into a single contest.

2. Entry fee: the entry fee is $30. This can be paid through PayPal, or by check to:

If mailing a check, please be sure your name, address, and manuscript title are on the check or legible on the envelope, or else written on a piece of paper enclosed. This allows us to match checks with entries.

All judging is done "blind": the judges have no information except the manuscript itself and its title. Judging is done in several rounds. Manuscripts that are placed in the "awards" category will be divided into Honorable Mention, Semifinalist, and Finalist categories. These will be announced in May or early June. The first-prize winner will then be chosen from among the finalist manuscripts.

Lev Raphael is the author of 20 books, including novels, memoirs, and story collections. He has published reviews in papers such as The Washington Post and The Detroit Free Press, and articles and essays in numerous publications. Prizes include the Harvey Swados Fiction Prize, the Reed Smith Fiction Prize and International Quarterly's Prize for Innovative Prose. Read more about Lev Raphael here.

First Prize: publication contract offer from Leapfrog Press, with an advance payment, plus the finalist awards (see below).

Finalists: $150 and two critiques of the manuscript from contest judges; permanent listing on the Leapfrog Press contest page as a contest finalist, along with short author bio and description of the book.

Semi-Finalist: Choice of a free Leapfrog book; permanent listing on the Web site

We encourage winners of all contests to inform us of any publicity/contracts/reviews of their entries. We will be happy to post that information on our Web site and in our newsletter.

Total entries: 546. Short story collections: 24%. Authors: 52% men. 7% non-US. Countries: Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Trinidad & Tobago, United Arab Emerites, and the United Kingdom.

In the stories of “Our Big Game,” George Rosen focuses on wanderers—expatriates, refugees, or the simply discontented—who have left behind the restrictions and the certainties of home. An English missionary sailing to 19th-century Africa to convert heathen he can barely imagine, a divorced American teacher of Business English seeking in Mexico in middle age a new language to understand his life, a group of veterans of the Old Left who find themselves strangers in the strange land that their own country has become—all look in new and different worlds for the surprise of hope and the rediscovery of love.

George Rosen was born in Chicago and educated at Harvard. In addition to working as a political speechwriter, a high-school debate coach, and a low-income-housing consultant, he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kenya, which served as the setting for his 1990 novel, Black Money (Scarborough House), called by Kirkus Reviews “a sophisticated, rich, and tantalizing portrait of East Africa” and by Library Journal “a strong study of power that corrupts at every level and of idealism that persists.” His short stories have appeared, among other places, in Harper’s, the Yale Review, the Harvard Review, and a Harcourt Brace anthology of crime fiction, A Matter of Crime. Rosen has reported on West Africa for the Atlantic, on Mexico for the Boston Globe, and writes frequently for the Globe’s op-ed page. He has been a radio commentator for the Boston NPR station, WBUR, and taught writing at Tufts University. His awards include the Frank O’Connor Memorial Award from the editors of Descant, two fellowships from the Artists Foundation, and most recently, a Fellowship in Fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Tracy DeBrincat’s debut story collection, Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night (Subito Press/University of Colorado), won the 2010 Prize for Innovative Fiction and is a 2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist. Her prize-winning short stories and poetry have been published in journals from Another Chicago Magazine to Zyzzyva. Tracy’s hometown is San Francisco, but she loves living in Los Angeles, where she is a freelance creative advertising consultant and authors the blog Bigfoot Lives! www.tracydebrincat.com

Hollywood Buckaroo is the darkly comic tale of a wannabe director coming to grips with love, death and family secrets while filming a hamburger commercial. Sander is a plumber's son and aspiring filmmaker whose thirtysomething life is in the toilet. Unable to grieve for his recently deceased dad, he takes advantage of an opportunity to direct a commercial starring a freshly rehabbed pop star on location in the old west town of Buckaroo for a producer who needs, well...someone with no talent. Amid Sander's efforts to prevent the troubled project from imploding, a host of eccentric locals jumpstart his creative juices and crack open the places in Sander’s heart where he loves and can grieve for his father.

Allen Learst has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in War, Literature and the Arts, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, Hawaii Review, Passages North, Ascent, The Literary Review, Pisgah, and Water~Stone. His essay, “The Blood of Children,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received a “Special Mention” in the 2008 Pushcart Prize XXXII Best of the Small Presses, and a “Notable” in the 2007 The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Marinette.

My stories reveal the aftermath of war through the voices of Vietnam veterans and their families. These stories take place in Detroit, a bleak environment that backgrounds the edgy, violent, and often dysfunctional motivations of my characters, who manage throughout their wanderings to exhibit moments of tenderness and compassion. My intention is to show my audience parallels between all wars, the suffering those who return from combat must confront and the suffering of those who survive war’s consequences: threats of violence, suicide, anxiety, alienation, and depression. These stories are about loss and redemption; they are about survival.

Janice D. Soderling is a writer, poet and translator. This collection of short stories and flash fiction ranges from lyrical prose through surrealism to narrative. Her awards for writing in English include first place in a short fiction competition at Glimmer Train Stories and the Harold Witt Memorial Award from Blue Unicorn for Best-of-Volume 2010; for her Swedish writing, she was recipient of the 2007 Artistic Women regional award from Stiftelsen för Kvinnlig konstnärskap och kreativitet (Foundation for Women's Artistry and Creativity); her work appears more than one hundred print and online venues based in the United States, Canada, England, Australia and other countries, and in several American and Swedish anthologies. She grew up in the United States but lives in Sweden.

David Harris Ebenbach's first book of short stories, Between Camelots (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the GLCA New Writer's Award. His poetry has appeared in, among other places, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Subtropics, and Mudfish. Recently awarded fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, Ebenbach has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com.

The short story collection Into the Wilderness explores the powerful experience of parenting from many angles: an eager-to-connect divorced father takes his kids to a Jewish-themed baseball game; a lesbian couple tries to decide whether their toddler son needs a man in his life; one young couple debates the idea of parenthood while another struggles with infertility; a mother recovering from a difficult pregnancy throws herself back into the world of dance. We also get to know a new single mother named Judith in four stories scattered throughout the book. These stories both stand alone and, when taken together, form a novelistic narrative arc that takes the reader through Judith's challenging first weeks of motherhood, culminating in an intense and redemptive baby-naming ceremony. These stories -- the Judith stories and all the others -- approach the world of parenthood with freshness, sympathy, humor, complexity and awe. Several have been published in literary magazines, such as Agni, Ascent, the Antioch Review and the North American Review, and one was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Elizabeth Zinn grew up in Michigan and attended the University of Michigan and the University of Paris as a Fulbright Scholar. After a career in music she spent eight years as Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at the University of Arizona before retiring to write fiction full time. After a lifetime of authoring various nonfiction and academic works, she now has completed three novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of poems. Her short story Dancer won an Honorable Mention in Glimmertrain’s 2010 Short Story Award for New Writers competition, placing it in the top 5% of over a thousand other works. She lives in a small town in the mountains of southern Arizona.

Heart’s Blood is a novel of place, filled with lyrical and cinematic descriptions of the grasslands and vistas of the southern Arizona border, the changing seasons, and the people who are part of the rich mix of rural life at the end of the 20th century. It is a family saga, spanning two generations beginning in the early 1970s. The story follows the life of the central character, Tyler McNeil, from his impulsive (and fateful) decision to leave his itinerant existence, through unexpected parenthood, loss, love, and finally peace in his old age. A cast of colorful characters wander in and out of the tale, sometimes taking center stage, sometimes weaving themselves into the tapestry of the whole. We meet Mana, an illiterate and abused border crosser who bears a child and then vanishes; Lita, her infant daughter whom Ty adopts and raises; the complex and evil Blanco, leader of a powerful drug cartel; the frightening Marcela Beltran, Blanco’s wife, who only eats white food and covets Lita’s daughter; Claire, the love of Ty’s life whose stumbling heart threatens to take her from him; and, CJ, Ty’s natural son who rejects him when he learns of his parenthood. These and many others serve up a hearty mixture of love, hate, murder, compassion, and humor.

A mob boss, a schizophrenic painter, and a choir of interdimensional aliens with very sharp teeth are all that stand between Shawn and jazz stardom. Shawn's music is more than just unusual. It's a portal to other worlds and a magnet for groupies so disturbed that they form a cult in his honor, scaring off the love of his life, the one person he can't do without.

Scott Shachter has performed his flutes, clarinets and saxophones in groups ranging from the American Symphony to Manhattan Transfer, as well as on more than fifty Broadway shows, including Billy Elliot, 42nd Street, Phantom and The Producers. He has a Master of Arts, summa cum laude, from California State University, Northridge, and a Bachelor of Science, magna cum laude, from Temple University. OUTSIDE IN, his first novel, reached the quarterfinals for the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

For Marcus, in the face of unrelenting catastrophe (the seven trumpets of the Book of Revelations, to be specific), the question of how to go on is impossible. There is no time. Hail, forest fires, swarms of locusts, the earth collapsing into itself, bodies falling from the sky, all of these things are daily happenings for Marcus, his family and his friends. The book chronicles Marcus' efforts to live in this catastrophic world, to find what human connections he can, and to question their function, as the chaos around him destroys the ground on which these relationships are formed.

Colin Winnette is an author and artist living in Chicago. HIs award-winning novella Revelation is forthcoming in October 2011, with Mutable Sound. His short work can be found in American Short Fiction, Alice Blue Review, Spork Press, Everyday Genius, and many others. An excerpt from his new novel, In One Story, can be found in the May Issue of PANK Magazine. You can find him online at www.colinwinnette.com. Or catch him in person this summer (2011), on tour with the poet Ben Clark. Dates and locations are available at colinwinnette.com or benclarkpoetry.com.

Jacob M. Appel has published over two hundred short stories in literary journals and has been short-listed for the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize and Pushcart Prize on numerous occasions. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Creative Writing Program at New York University. He currently teaches at the Gotham Writers' Workshop and practices medicine at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. More at: www.jacobmappel.com.

A town that came together in the early 20th century as a stage set: a steelworks that ultimately stretched nine miles along the Ohio River; thirteen company-erected housing plans into which the laborers who spoke a myriad of languages were segregated ethnically and racially; a busy commercial area with a single main street running down through the center of a steep valley; 15,000 workers and their families—all this way of life comes to an abrupt end on August 8, 1983, when the conglomerate that owns the mill shuts it down. A Wilderness of Monkeys, set in Ganaego, Pennsylvania, is a collection of interlocking stories whose characters form a diverse ethnic, racial, and generational stew of lives and passions. Beneath the stories of the individuals runs the deeper story of Ganaego itself, its rise to a flourishing community and its fall into bankruptcy. The stories range in era from 1937 through 2004. At the heart of the book is the story of August 8, 1983, “Shutdown,” when the steelworks closed and everything changed, a day every Ganaegoan will always remember.

A Wilderness of Monkeys was a finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction; it was also a finalist in the Sewanee Writers’ Series.

Robert McKean, recipient of a Massachusetts Arts Council grant, writes fiction set in and around the steel-mill towns of Western Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in a number of publications, including, most notably, The Kenyon Review, the Chicago Review, and the Dublin Quarterly. His current projects are two novels: A Catalog of Crooked Thoughts, which explores profound loss and recovery; and Shutdown, which deals with the cataclysmic Rust-Belt Depression of the 1980s. Shutdown was a finalist in the Heekin Group Foundation James Fellowship for the Novel in Progress and a semi-finalist in the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.

Mark Brazaitis is the author of three books of fiction, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and a book of poetry, The Other Language, winner of the 2008 ABZ Poetry Prize. His stories have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Witness, Notre Dame Review, Confrontation, Beloit Fiction Journal, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He directs the Creative Writing Program at West Virginia University. http://creativewriting.wvu.edu/about_the_program

The Incurables is about characters who believe they are stuck in inescapable situations.

The Impossibility of Crows is a serious, and often seriously funny, novel about love, the power of the natural world, the fragility of ideas and how perception often determines our fate.

Leo Melampus is not exactly dead. But then again, he never really lived. When an earthquake casts his routine existence into the abyss, he feels strangely elated. Free at last, Leo flees into the unknown and finds himself off the map in a town called Elysium Fields. It’s almost heaven. But not quite. Crows communicate with unimaginable clarity. Millions of narcissi dance in the fields. A beautiful 19th century idea, seeking someone to think her once more into existence, takes human form. A romance novelist is hell-bent on making Leo into her hero and will not be deterred. An elegant, charming widow appears to be a philanthropic murderess. An artist paints the weather before it occurs. In Elysium, Leo learns to discern improbability from impossibility, to accept beauty he cannot always comprehend. Confronting the malleability of perceived reality, Leo Melampus grasps the potential of his own imagination for shaping the world in which he lives. But he’s not the only local citizen with an imagination. When Leo’s wondrous Elysian idyll is poisoned by the relentless designs of the amorous novelist, Leo becomes the snake in his own paradise. One of them has to go. In trying to protect what he has come to love, will he destroy it forever?

In addition to The Impossibility of Crows, Rosanne Daryl Thomas has recently completed The Ladies of the Italian Class and the Urge to Purloin (writing as Edie Watson). She is currently working on the second Ladies of the Italian Class novel and putting the final touches on a travel memoir. Her novel The Angel Carver (Random House/Warner Books) was named a New York Times “Notable Book”, and featured by Barnes and Noble in “Discover Great New Writers”. She is the author of Awaiting Grace (Picador US) and the memoir Beeing: Life, Motherhood and 180,000 Honeybees (Lyons Press/ Globe Pequot). She both wrote and illustrated the graphic novella Coffee: The Bean of My Existence (An Owl Book/Holt). Rosanne Daryl Thomas has an MFA in film from Columbia University and taught writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst honors college.

Letitia L. Moffitt was born and raised in Hawaii. She received a doctoral degree in English and Creative Writing from Binghamton University in New York, and she currently teaches creative writing as an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University. Her work—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—has been published in literary journals including PANK, Black Warrior Review, Aux Arc Review, Jabberwock Review, Coe Review, The MacGuffin, and Dos Passos Review. http://baberunner.blogspot.com/

Sidewalk Dancing consists of thirteen interconnected short stories focused on a multi-ethnic family in Hawaii. Six hours after shy, pragmatic Grace Chao and globetrotting dreamer George McGee get married, they hop on a plane to Oahu to start a new life, as chronicled in Sidewalk Dancing. Together they build a house, raise a child, and run a popular local diner, even while they seem to be polar opposites in every way. George keeps coming up with new, big ideas—for himself, his family, the world—while Grace simply wants the world to leave her alone. Their daughter Miranda wonders how two such different people could ever have gotten together, and how so many conflicts between her parents (and increasingly within herself) will ever be resolved. Miranda eventually begins to see that some people feel like outsiders no matter where they are, and this may be the one thing all her family members have in common. Just as her parents struggle through conflicts of culture and character, Miranda struggles to find a sense of wholeness in her own identity and with her own relationships.

Zenju Earthlyn Marselean Manuel is a Zen priest, visual artist, and author of many spiritual books including Tell Me Something About Buddhism (Hampton Roads Publishing, 2011). She is a recipient of three Hedgebrook writers-in-residencies. The Water Monarchs is her first novel.

In The Water Monarchs, set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a stabbing forces a family of slaves to leave St. Domingue/Haiti and take refuge on an Island that is unknown to the outside world and therefore unknown to slave owners. Off the coast of Louisiana, on the new beautiful Island of Le Grand Du Pointe, their lives are shaped by the magic of water. The main character and narrator, Yuli, lives out a destiny created by the actions of her mother, Erzuli Pierrot, a slave of St. Domingue who was named for the Haitian Vodou Lwa spirit of love.

Norma Rosen has published four novels and a short-story collection. Family Lovers concerns lovers who have lost their connection to one another and seek new ones.

"[E]xcellent and lively. There is a sharp wit in many of these stories, the apt metaphor, the turn of phrase that pleases and surprises."

"[B]right, brassy, spunky, intelligent. Ingenious writing. Also quirky and filled with metaphoric twists that often startle. Energetic and telling. This is an excellent short story collection."

"A wonderful voice all its own... [S]trong command of voice, period and ethnic dialect, and clear love and in-depth knowledge of Duke Ellington and his band."

Leapfrog Press is delighted to honor its 2010 Fiction Contest winners. Twenty winning manuscripts were chosen out of 448 adult fiction entries, and seven winners out of 153 middle grade / YA manuscripts. Manuscripts were judged "blind" (judges did not know the names of the authors or any other information). Manuscripts were submitted from 22 countries, giving the judges a delightful diversity of style and theme.

Please click on the authors' names for more information on the winners and their manuscripts. This information is gradually being updated.

Tales from Planet Wine Cooler (linked stories) by Kate Baggott, Germany/Canada

Poet in New York: A novel of Federico Garcia Lorca (novel) by Bryan T. Scoular, Switzerland

Six manuscripts almost made honorable mention. They were among the top 6% of entries, and we feel they deserve mention here.

Total children's fiction manuscripts: 153. 28% men, 70% women; 13% non US. (2% sex unknown based on author's names)

US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Spain; and in no particular order, China, Israel, Thailand, France, Turkey, Bulgaria, Trinidad & Tabago, Greece, Nigeria, Morocco, New Zealand, Hungary, Indonesia.

Alexandria LaFaye is an associate professor of English at California State University in San Bernardino, and the author of eight novels for middle-grade readers. Her novels have received many awards, including a Notable Children's Book Award from the Smithsonian Institute (The Strength of Saints); the Scott O'Dell Award for historical fiction, a Nebraska Book Award, and a California Book Award (Worth); and Best Book listings for Band Street College of Education (The Year of the Sawdust Man and Edith Shay).

Marge Piercy is the author of 39 books, including 14 novels, many volumes of poetry, a memoir, and several works of nonfiction. Awards include, among many others, the Patterson Award for Literary Achievement, the Patterson Poetry Prize, an American Library Association Notable Book Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (UK).

Joan Connor’s stories in How to Stop Loving Someone explore the vagaries, and vicissitudes, the velleities and verities of love and lust, of loneliness and loss. Tonally the stories range from the dark to the darkly comic, from the optimistic to the outright silly. Geographically they wander from Greece to Maine, from Vermont to the fictional Hobson’s Choice (somewhere near Troy, New York). But wherever her characters find themselves, whether lucky or unlucky in love, whether in their teens or middle-age, they cling tenaciously to the belief that the quest for love is self-validating, that love is yet possible.

Joan Connor is a full professor at Ohio University and a professor in Fairfield University’s low residency MFA program. She is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Award, the John Gilgun award, a Pushcart Prize, the Ohio Writer award in fiction and nonfiction, the AWP award for her short story collection, History Lesson, and the River Teeth Award for her collection of essays, The World Before Mirrors. Her two earlier collections are: We Who Live Apart and Here On Old Route 7. Her work has appeared in: Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Chelsea, Manoa, The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, The Journal of Arts & Letters, and Black Warrior, among others publications. She lives in Athens, Ohio, and Belmont, Vermont.

Bad harvest. Father dead from the long lingering illness. Hana’s mother is left with her twins: a boy and a girl, Hana. There is only thing Hana’s mother can do: remarry so that the boy can live, so that the mother and the boy can live, but on one condition – to sell Hana to a broker and pretend that she died. This is where Hana’s journey as a ghost, and her twin brother's bondage to the land start.

Born in Tokyo and raised in Europe and America, Mariko Nagai studied English at New York University. Her numerous honors include the Erich Maria Remarque Fellowship from New York University, fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for the Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi. She has received the Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction. Nagai’s collection of poems, Histories of Bodies, won the Benjamin Saltman Prize from Red Hen Press. Her first collection of stories, Georgic: Stories, won the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize in Fiction and will be published by BkMk Press in fall 2010. She teaches creative writing and literature at Temple University, Japan Campus in Tokyo.

Set in late Depression-era South Dakota, The Color of Weather pivots around Janey Weed and the family house that was passed down to her. Through word of mouth, Janey begins to shelter women running away from violent situations. When Daisy and her daughter May appear at Janey’s back door, the course Janey chooses leads her to accept dangerous compromises in order to follow her heart, and her convictions.

Amy Schutzer is an award-winning poet and fiction writer who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her first novel, Undertow, (Calyx Books, 2000), was a Lambda Book Award finalist, Violet Quill Award finalist and Today's Librarian Best of 2000 Award winner. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of literary reviews and magazines including Portland Review, Fireweed, HLFQ, Sequoia and Hurricane Alice. She is the recipient of an Astraea Foundation Grant for Fiction (1997), and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund (1999). She has recently finished revision on a third novel, and is hard at work on a fourth book; and always, poems.

Josie Sigler "El Camino"

Spanning from the Gulf War to the War in Iraq, El Camino is a collection of short stories about those fighting for survival in the post-industrial heartland: a gay Marine attacked by men from his own unit, a girl living in a motel where her mother works as a prostitute, and a man who intentionally sets himself on fire when he loses his job at General Motors.

Josie Sigler’s stories and poems have appeared in Water~Stone, Silk Road, Hayden’s Ferry Review and others. Her chapbook, Calamity, was published by Proem Press. Her book of poetry, living must bury, winner of the 2010 Motherwell Prize, was published by Fence Books. Her story “Deep, Michigan” received a special mention in the 2009 Pushcart Prize Anthology. She was recently awarded the 2011 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency for her short story “El Camino” (forthcoming in Roanoke Review). She is currently at work on a novel, The Johns, and a new book of poems, Hospitality.

Ashley Cowger "Peter Never Came"

First-Prize winner, Autumn House Press fiction contest. To be published in 2011.

Peter Never Came includes thematically linked stories that explore the difference between the way we see the world as children and the way we see the world as adults. The stories are arranged from childhood to adulthood and ultimately explore how we manage to accept and eventually learn to love the world for what it is, not what we think it should be.

Ashley Cowger holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her short fiction has appeared in several literary journals and has been nominated for a Pushcart. She is editor and cofounder of the online journal, MFA/MFYou (www.mfamfyou.com), and she teaches college English and lives in Ohio.

Katherine Karlin "Send Me Work"

"Send Me Work" is a collection of short stories about women on the job--including a shipyard welder, a refinery operator, a print saleswoman, and an orchestra oboist.

Katherine Karlin's fiction has appeared in the Pushcart Prize collection, New Stories From the South, One-Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, L.A. Weekly, and many other journals. She teaches creative writing at Kansas State University.

Chantel Acevedo "Blue Exile"

Set in Cuba and Miami, covering nearly fifty years of tropical history, the stories in BLUE EXILE unfold the lives of Cuban and Cuban-American families in the patterns and permutations of memory, exile politics, and growing up on both sides of the ninety mile stretch of water that separates the two places. BLUE EXILE conjures a Cuban setting that evokes mysticism and magic.

Chantel Acevedo's novel, LOVE AND GHOST LETTERS (St. Martin's Press, 2005), won the Latino International Book Award for Best Historical Fiction and was nominated for the Connecticut Book of the Year. Acevedo's short stories and poems have appeared in such journals as The Chattahoochee Review, Prairie Schooner, Cimarron Review and American Poetry Review, among others. Acevedo currently serves as co-editor of the Southern Humanities Review, and is as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University.

Marjorie Maddox "What She Was Saying"

This linked short-story collection explores power and silences in women’s voices and grapples—in this unsafe world—with the definitions and boundaries of “home.” The collection was one of three finalists for the 2005 Katherine Anne Porter Book Award and a semifinalist for Eastern Washington University’s Spokane Fiction Book Award. Individual stories have previously appeared in a variety of literary journals, magazines, anthologies, and newspapers.

Director of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published Weeknights at the Cathedral (an Editions Selection, WordTech, 2006); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (2004 Yellowglen Prize, WordTech Editions); Perpendicular As I (1994 Sandstone Book Award); When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name: Baseball Poems (2001 Redgreene Press Chapbook Winner), six chapbooks, and over 350 poems, stories, and essays in ournals and anthologies. She is the co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press 2005) and author of two children’s books from Boyds Mills Press: A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry (2008) and The Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009). The recipient of numerous awards, Marjorie lives with her husband and two children in Williamsport, PA. www.lhup.edu/mmaddoxh/biography

Chandler Klang Smith "Goldenland Past Dark"

Goldenland Past Dark follows Webern Bell, a 16-year-old hunchbacked midget on the road with a ramshackle traveling circus in 1960s America. Alienated by his deformity from the larger world but at home among his circus family, Webern devotes himself to his acts—surreal clown performances that come to him in dreams. As he travels through a landscape of abandoned amusement parks and rural ghost towns, he is haunted by his bizarre family history, particularly his otherworldly sisters and the role they may have played in his mother's death. Other characters include Nepenthe, the seductive Lizard Girl, whose relationship with Webern leads to unforeseen complications; Dr. Show, the grandly flawed ringleader of the circus, whose relentless showmanship conceals a failed life; Marzipan, a chimp who wearily regards the folly of human behavior while tending to her hapless owners; and Wags, Webern's childhood friend, who may or may not be imaginary, and whose motives are far darker than they seem.

Chandler Klang Smith is a graduate of Bennington College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she received a School of the Arts Writing Fellowship. She has worked as a reader for the Columbia Journal and the Paris Review. She has also ghost-written two YA novels for Alloy Entertainment Group and taught creative writing in Columbia's Double Discovery and INTRO programs. An excerpt from Goldenland Past Dark won the Bronx Writers Center Chapter One award in 2006, and the completed novel was nominated for a Pushcart Editor's Book Award in 2009. Chandler grew up in Springfield, Illinois, and now lives in New York City, where she works as an editorial assistant at a literary agency and as the Events Coordinator for the KGB Bar.

Annam Manthiram "Dysfunction"

Dramatically different in style and form, these tales range from the wicked (a divorcée recounts her failed marriages sardonically from A to Z), to heart-wrenchingly commonplace (an older Indian woman struggles to find a husband during humiliating bride-viewings), and emotionally barren (a mother cannot understand why her family doesn’t love her enough to remember her son’s first birthday). At times funny, but always incisive, this collection of stories examines the survival of those whose only certainty is dysfunction.

Annam Manthiram is the author of two novels, The Goju Story and After the Tsunami, and a short story collection. Her fiction has recently appeared in the Chicago Quarterly Review, the Cream City Review, the Concho River Review, Straylight, Blink | Ink, the Grey Sparrow Journal, and the anthology, Daily Flash: 365 Days of Flash Fiction (Pill Hill Press – December 2010),and has been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Prize and inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology. A graduate of the M.A. Writing program at the University of Southern California, Ms. Manthiram resides in New Mexico with her husband, Alex and son, Sathya.

Annam's novel "After the Tsunami" is forthcoming (Fall 2011) from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. See Annam's website at www.annammanthiram.com.

Kate Baggott "Tales from Planet Wine Cooler"

Tales from Planet Wine Cooler is a collection of short stories about a young woman and her best friend. The pieces are united by the themes of sex, music and the Internet. Some pieces from the collection are available online at Once Written and Unbrellazine. Other pieces are upcoming at Ghoti Magazine, Third Wednesday and JAAM (Just Another Art Movement).

Kate Baggott is a Canadian writer living in Germany. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a BA from the University of Toronto. Her work ranges from technology journalism to creative non-fiction and from experimental fiction to chick lit. Links to recently published pieces can be found at www.katebaggott.com .

Melody Mansfield "A Bug Collection"

If you think bugs are "cute," read no further. This "Bug Collection" contains no cautionary tales for children, no morally uplifting fables, no top-hatted crickets or pig-loving spiders. What it does contain is sex, and death, and pretension, depression, sarcasm, longing. Politics. Spiritual questioning. Teleological matters. All the things that make humans human. Except that everything these characters do, they do really fast and hard because they are, well, bugs.

Melody Mansfield's first novel, The Life Stone of Singing Bird, was published by Faber and Faber, Inc., in 1996 and earned favorable reviews from The New York Times Book Review, Booklist, and others. Her articles, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in a variety of print and online publications including Inside English, The Rectangle, Pedestal, Thought Magazine, Wild Violet, Fickle Muses, Ascent Aspirations, Spillway Review, Magaera, and Parent's Magazine. Ms. Mansfield is a full-time high school teacher who has managed to eek out two additional novels--when not reading sophomore essays--along with this short story collection

Bryan T. Scoular "Poet in New York: A novel of Federico Garcia Lorca"

In the summer of 1929, reeling from rejection by Salvador Dalí and depressed by the commercial success of THE GYPSY BALLADS, Federico García Lorca decided to travel abroad. “New York must be horrible, but that’s why I’m going there,” he wrote to a friend. “I think I’ll have a great time.” POET IN NEW YORK tells the story of how Lorca, born in rural Andalusia, came to write one of the great poetic masterpieces of the past century about urban alienation, spiritual emptiness, and metaphysical solitude. The novel traces the young Spaniard’s steps during his year in America and explores his loneliness, regrets, and longing, his constant struggle with his sexual identity, and his effort to push his newfound avant-garde aesthetic to the limit in his poetry, plays, drawings, and screenplays. At the same time, it shows Federico absorbing the spirit of the “sprawling Babel” as he visits the sights, meets various literary and cultural figures, witnesses the Crash on Wall Street, and enjoys the nightlife of Harlem.

Bryan Scoular earned an M.A. in Spanish at the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in Spanish literature at New York University. He has published several articles of literary criticism and has translated the critically acclaimed memoir MIDDAY WITH BUÑUEL, by Claudio Isaac. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland, and is currently working on his second novel.

J. L. Bautista "Funerals and Other Fiestas"

A disparate collection of nobodies—a woman old before her time, another whose beauty is useless to her, an orphaned baby, a child whore, a blind man, a doctor with a killing secret—come together in nineteen-thirties’ Spain, their intersected stories the micro-history of a country struggling through civil war and dictatorship.

J. L. Bautista was born in California and travels between her home in the Bay Area and Madrid, Spain. Fiestas, her first published book, is drawn primarily from the recollections and experiences of family and friends and was the winner of the 2005 George Garrett Prize in Fiction. It contains two stories based on chapters of her novel Funerals and Other Fiestas. She has published and won awards for short fiction, poetry, and essays, and worked as a journalist and researcher. She is presently at work on her fifth novel.

Michael Downs "The Greatest Show"

July 6, 1944. Hartford, Connecticut. Fire flashes along the wall of a circus tent while inside a crowd of moslty women and children enjoy a matinee performance. Within minutes, hundreds will die. Those who survive will never forget the clowns and the screams. In these stories, the fire still burns.

Michael Downs’ book House of Good Hope (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His short fiction has been mentioned among other distinguished stories in the Best American Short Stories series and earned him a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where he teaches creative writing at Towson University and directs the school’s reading series.

Callie Bates "The Foothills of Olympus"

Set in the aftermath of the second world war, The Foothills of Olympus follows Marion Corbeau on a journey to Greece in search of her missing brother. The novella reflects upon the ties that bind brothers and sisters, people and ideals, mixing communism and civil war with family relations, while the figure of T.E. Lawrence looms in the characters' personal and ideological pasts.

Callie Bates is a 2009 graduate (B.A.) of Lawrence University, where The Foothills of Olympus was her senior honors thesis. One might also say she is a graduate, 2010, of the School of Life, as she is currently in remission from endometrial cancer. She won the 2007 Nick Adams Contest and Lawrence's Didderrich Prize in Creative Writing. Her work ranges in scope from historical fiction to magic realism, nonfiction essays to contemporary short stories. She currently lives in Wisconsin.

Starkey Flythe "The Byrd House"

Starkey Flythe's stories have been anthologized in Best American, New Stories from the South, and the O. Henry Prize volumes. He was re-founding editor of The Saturday Evening Post, and served in the Middle East and Africa. He is the winner of the 2010 Snake Nation Press Prize for his collection of short fiction, Driving with Hand Controls.

Julie Valentine "The Soothing Balm of Cadmium Red"

Gregory Ashford is a Princeton University dropout and the son of an abusive alcoholic. Once he’s finally grown his list of dead-end jobs and sabotaged his relationship with the only girlfriend he has allowed close to him, Greg concludes that suicide is his next best option. It is his unlikely encounter with a mysterious 11-year-old boy, a handball and a pencil that lead him to the self-acceptance that has always eluded him.

Julie Valentine is an executive assistant at a major motion picture studio in Los Angeles. She graduated from New York University with a B.F.A in Film and Television Production, but found she enjoyed the writing aspect of film best of all. The Soothing Balm of Cadmium Red is one novella of eight in the book We Will Dance Where We Are & Be and when it is completed, it will be her first novel.

Barbara Salvatore Klopping "Other People's Ghosts"

Other People's Ghosts are all dreams; very vivid dreams, where the author is not herself, but occupies the body of a complete stranger. Until recently, Barbara thought everyone had dreams like this. The stories are brief dramas and glimpses, sometimes only surreal snapshots, into Other People's lives.

Barbara Salvatore Klopping is owner of Beyond Design Inc., a company that specializes in fabrication services for Broadway, film, museums, the art and architectural markets. (www.beyonddesigninc.com ) She lives on an old dairy farm in Walton, New York, with her family, and a team of Percheron horses, small pet menagerie and large herb garden. She has a studio in Nebraska, where research and many illustrations for her books are done. Barbara holds a BFA in Painting from the School of Visual Arts and has extensively studied writing, theater, herbs and horses. She's had pieces published in Small Farm Journal, United Plant Savers News, and the collective Ithaca Remembers. She is Founder and Editor of Who Knew? The Catskill Literary Magazine, with its premier issue due Summer 2010. Her novel, Big Horse Woman, was a Finalist in the 2009 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest.

Kunthavai Jayadevan "Ruth"

“We must be as swiftly moving and unrelenting, letting go of all the false things that hold us backwards…” – Ruth Michael Brown. Can one person affect the path of all humanity? Set in the Deep South, Ruth follows the life of a seemingly normal woman and the extraordinary direction her life takes. This soulful multi-generational epic hints of myth, but remains firmly grounded while seeking a clue to the very nature of Man. Guided by nothing more than her own thoughts and intentions, Ruth Michael Brown unapologetically molds the course of her family and ultimately the very direction of the world around her. A story about the potential of a single life, Ruth strides boldly through terrible darkness and pain into a destiny much greater than anyone could have ever comprehended.

Kunthavai Jayadevan’s first novel is Ruth. Her stories have been both short- and long-listed for the Fish Publishing International Short Story Prize and her poetry has been featured in several international publications. Her work has also been published in SCMP and she is the founder and former head of the non-profit green organization LIFE. A compulsive writer, outdoor adventurer, skydiver and mountaineer, Kunthavai spends her time exploring the far corners of the world, seeking out the common threads that bind humanity and listening for the often unheard voices. Having lived on five continents, sometimes in a life of peace, sometimes in the chaos of war, she has witnessed the incredible depth and mystery of seemingly common lives that people rarely reveal. She is currently completing her debut short story collection, STOMP And Other Gospels.

Pat Rushin "Quantum Physics and My Dog Bob"

Stories from Quantum Physics and My Dog Bob have appeared in The American Literary Review, The North Atlantic Review, The King's English, Lake Effect, The Southeast Review, Trillium, and elsewhere.

Richard Duggin "The Music Box Treaty"

Richard Duggin was raised in New England and received his bachelor’s degree in literature and writing from the University of New Hampshire and his master’s degree in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His written work includes three novels and numerous short stories, some of which have appeared in periodicals such as Beloit Fiction Journal, Crosscurrents, Laurel Review, American Literary Review, The Sun, Playboy, and elsewhere. His work has been cited by Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Playboy Magazine Best Fiction. He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Merit Awards, and several artist residencies at Ragdale, Yaddo and the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Ted Cleary "Song of the Cicada"

TED CLEARY received a B.A. and M.A. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was awarded the Cornell Woolrich Fellowship and Seymour Brick Memorial Prize for creative writing and playwriting. He has published in various literary magazines and written songs, stories, poems, screenplays and novellas. He teaches writing in New York City.

Claire Ortalda "God's Tears, New Mexico"

Claire Ortalda, who has experienced various incarnations as a journalist, editor and English instructor, has been published in numerous literary journals and been the recipient of Hackney, Fugue, Georgia State University and other fiction and poetry prizes. God's Tears, New Mexico, is a linked story collection about a small southwest town whose peculiar geography "excites problems of identity in nearly everyone in town," as the quirky residents grapple with issues of love, death, purpose and virtue.

Richard Goodwin "How Long Must I Dream"

Wicker wants to win enough in Vegas to get his mother’s cremains out of storage, buy a van and never work again. He’s a slot machine aficionado, a boozer and drug user who’s been wetting the bed lately and struggling to tame his unruly hair. His plans are sidetracked when he meets Edna, a spacey elderly woman trying to get to the ocean. They fall in love (sort of) and wind up in Tokyo, where Wicker drinks himself right into a teaching job at an English conversation school, and Edna disappears deeper into her own blurry world.

Richard Goodwin has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. He lives in Vancouver, Washington, and teaches ESL at Portland Community College. His short fiction has appeared in Monkeybicycle, The Adirondack Review, and The Dream People. He is currently at work on his second novel.

Gail Tansill Lambert "Aesop: The Storyteller"

“Aesop: The Storyteller” is set in the ancient Greek world of slaves, sailors, merchants, wars and gods; all of which contribute to the slave boy Aesop’s eventual fame as the most celebrated storyteller in all of history.

Gail Lambert holds a Graduate Degree in Children’s Literature from Hollins University as well as a BA and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. She was a frequent reviewer for Best Sellers with a review included in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 30, as well asa Contributing Writer and Editor of Notable Women of Southwest Virginia, 1850 – 1950 published by the Historical Society of Western Virginia, 2007. She authored an essay for National Public Radio in 2009, teaches high school Latin, and is a regularly published freelance writer in Virginia.

Kirsten Lopresti "Bright Coin Moon"

Kirsten Lopresti has an MFA from George Mason University. Her fiction has appeared in The Laurel Review, New Delta Review, So To Speak, Italian Americana, and Licking River Review. Bright Coin Moon has won two other fiction prizes. It placed second in the James River Writer's Best Unpublished Novel Contest, and it was picked out of 1,700 entries to win the grand prize in the YA Discovery Contest.

Courtney Sirotin "Madison Billsby: Taco Defender"

Meet Madison Billsby, the only girl in her seventh grade class who has to stand in the back row with the boys on picture day. It’s not because she’s tall and blessed with long legs like Giselle or a swan-like torso like Paris; quite frankly, it’s because she’s too wide. Madison is perfectly happy to live a life out of the spotlight until she finds out that Charlotte DuVain, the queen bee of the snobby girls, is going to run for student council president uncontested and for all the wrong reasons. The only way Madison can save her school from a year without a solid student government is to run against Charlotte herself. With a fierce appetite and a driving sense of justice, Madison Billsby and her loyal friends embark on a mission to defend the hot lunch menu and fight for the rights of their classmates.

Courtney Sirotin has a master's degree in Visual and Media Arts and has been in the entertainment industry since 2001. She started her career at a television network in Boston where she was the entertainment news reporter and then moved to NYC to be the Interactive Manager at Alloy Entertainment, where she developed the company’s online presence. Courtney lives in Georgia with her husband and is the author of the educational website www.foolyourselffit.com and the corresponding e-book, Metablolize This! Everything You Need To Know To Kick-Start Your Metabolism. When she’s not writing novels or articles for magazines, Courtney freelances as writer and works in film production. She is currently producing the film Quarterlife Ben and just completed production on the film adaptation of the tween novel, The Fat Boy Chronicles, a story about a teenage boy struggling to lose weight during his freshman year of high school.

David Rish "No Laughing Matter"

No Laughing Matter is the story of Dal, Ben and Cassie, who live on an island and share a deep love of fun. A series of strange incidents occur on a camping trip; a really odd cloud, a nighttime explosion, the disappearance of a packet of Curdlers, the strange black oil Cassie swims into when out diving, which sucks the light from her life. On returning to their homes, they find things have changed. Their usually easygoing teacher seems to have lost the ability to laugh, Dal’s mother can’t be jollied out of her bad mood, and all the island’s residents are being drawn to the cheese factory for some odd reason. Could it be that the black oil Cassie encountered is actually some sort of alien invader and could it be that Ben is somehow collaborating with the invaders and is a traitor? Their friendship and indeed their island life are put in jeopardy but it is friendship and their shared sense of humour that might also save everybody. No Laughing Matter is a comedy about friendship with a storyline to hook the most demanding of readers. www.netspace.net.au/~drish/

David Rish has published a number of children’s novels in Australia, including the Family Award-winning Mongrel, Casey’s Case and the comedy Extraordinarily Ordinary. Other credits include radio plays, reviews and articles, interviews and a semi-regular humour column for Teacher, a magazine for, unsurprisingly, teachers! In a past life he was an early childhood teacher and he has an on-going passion for children’s literature. It is his long-standing wish to see Maurice Sendak win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Mick Carlon "Riding on Duke's Train"

It's 1939 and Danny, a twelve year old orphan, hitches a ride on a train belonging to Duke Ellington and his Famous Orchestra. Soon adopted by the musicians, the lad accompanies them on their Spring 1939 tour of Europe. While crossing Northern Germany to reach Denmark, Ellington and his band--all African-Americans--are held up by Nazi officials in Hamburg. The reader meets musicians such as Johnny "Rabbit" Hodges; Harry Carney; Rex Stewart; Jimmie Blanton; Cootie Williams; Ivie Anderson; Sonny Greer--and, of course, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington. Says the legendary jazz critic Nat Hentoff: "I knew Duke Ellington for many years, and the Duke in this book is the man I knew."

Len Spacek "The Summer of Love"

When Rubin Hardin goes for a ride on his Super Scout 249 motorcycle in the summer of 1969, he inadvertently stumbles on the biggest musical festival in American history. After giving Country Joe Mcdonald and various other “hippies” a ride to the concert, Rubin comes across a cherry red convertible with the most beautiful girl he has ever seen sitting on the hood. It only takes him a moment to realize that the girl is Summer Sweetwater, his brother’s old girlfriend. Tommy, Rubin’s brother, is off fighting the war in Vietnam. With thoughts of Tommy on their minds, Rubin and Summer embark on an adventurous and life-changing three-day journey. Their Summer of Love is carefree, that is, until Tommy comes home. Summer of Love is the story of Woodstock and Vietnam, first loves, brothers, and making difficult decisions. This book will give the reader the experience of what Woodstock was like, from the people to the music to the overall feeling of that moment in time.

Len Spacek has been an English teacher and coach for fourteen years at Harmon Middle School in Aurora, Ohio, and he recently became a proud father. He is a University of Dayton graduate, and he received his Master’s degree in Education from John Carroll University. He completed his MFA in creative writing from the Northeast Ohio MFA program. His passions are his family, teaching, writing, playing the guitar, and just about any sport. He cherishes the opportunity to influence the lives of his students. His goal is to make them want to become lifelong readers and to give them the opportunity to pursue their goals of becoming writers. The reason he started writing was because he felt like had something to share, and he wanted to inspire his students to read. He lives in Ohio with his wife Gretchen, his son Ryan, and his two dogs, Buddy and Skeeter.

Thom Mark Shepard "The Green Apettes"

The Green Apettes is a story about 13 year old Joe Sheffield, who idolizes his much older half-brother, Theo. But Theo is a poor role model, introducing Joe to graphic horror films. This resulted in a series of public panic attacks that has alienated Joe from most of his classmates. Now in middle school, Joe is a loner in need of new friends and begins to find one in Gina, the new girl in school. What keeps him stable are his humor, his piano playing, and his serious interest in designing flyers and posters. His latest flier, inspired by one of Theo’s tall tales, embroils him in a mystery. Searching for his principal’s kitten, he discovers that several cats, both pets and ferals, have vanished in a single day. As Joe investigates, his dark fantasies begin to resurface, and he comes to believe in the existence of cat-consuming primates that he calls the Green Apettes. When Theo makes a surprise visit, the two brothers go hunting for these very real creatures. But are they monsters? Are they part of an elaborate hoax? Or is the solution to this frightening and funny mystery something they never expected? In the process of discovering the truth, Joe learns to step out from his brother’s shadow and finds that both terror and solace can come from surprising sources.

Thom Shepard is a librarian at MIT Lincoln Lab. His story “Stick and Strings,” published in Mid-American Review in 1985, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his story “The Tannery” won the top fiction prize in Indiana University's Graduate Writing Program in 1989. Like so many budding writers, he stopped writing fiction when he married and helped raise a family. During these unfulfilling in-between years, he wrote papers and delivered presentations on digital preservation and all things metadata. He recently returned to writing fiction with a new interest in "crossover" young adult fiction.

The first-prize winner is Vickie Weaver, for her novel Billie Girl (formerly The Mercy of Killing).

Our list of winners includes novels, novellas, and short-story collections; traditional tales and post-modern tales, some that are neither of those, and a few grand fairy tales. Some of our judges' comments are given below. Please scroll down to read more about the winners and their manuscripts.

Excerpts from each manuscript will be posted soon. Quotes given below are from the contest judges.

"[H]eart rending, funny, sentimental, nostalgic, sad, shocking, surprising, and brilliant. It tears at the heart string and presents vivid, down-to-earth images, and more vivid, down-to-earth human beings who struggle along with what they are given. The writer isn't afraid to slip-slide around in the mud of human relationships and emotions. Billie Girl is a tremendous character."

"Off-the-charts creativity. Fluid abstractions provide glimpses of the complex dynamics of marriage...at times, the phrasing is heart-breakingly beautiful."

"Startling. Stunning. Magical...told in a language that surpasses itself, that goes well beyond the words on the page."

"It is impossible to read this book without admiring it. Big Horse Woman is a character you're not likely to meet in other novels of this ilk, nor are you likely to forget her stunning portrayal."

"[B]rilliant, twisted, poetic writing. Writing that encompasses vast creations and destruction, universes of the imagination."

"Virtually every piece in the collection is filled with a surprise, whether it be danger, humor, or something other-worldly."

Judges include authors/writing instructors/book reviewers Michael Lee, Michael Mirolla, and Michael Graziano, as well as Leapfrog's editor-in-chief and editorial staff.

First prize: Publication contract offer from Leapfrog Press, with an advance payment of $1,000, and permanent listing as a Leapfrog Fiction Contest winner on the Leapfrog Press Web site.

Finalist(s): $150 and two short critique of the manuscripts; permanent listing on the Leapfrog Press Web site as a Leapfrog Fiction Contest finalist.

A young couple sets out to build a life together in an unstable world: a world haunted by monsters, plagued by natural disasters, a world that seems on the verge of collapse--but also a place of transformation, wonder, and delight.

Each piece in this book is exactly 340 words in length. The book hovers between autobiography and mythology, between reality and surreality, between elation and anxiety, whimsy and darkness, anticipation and dread.

Helen Phillips received the 2008 Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction for an excerpt from And Yet They Were Happy. Excerpts from the book have appeared in Salt Hill Journal, Faultline, Small Spiral Notebook, Hotel St. George Press Literary Magazine, TheyAreFlyingPlanes, and Canto XXVI, and have received finalist status in three contests. Helen won the 2009 Meridian Editors’ Award for her short story “The Eyeballs of Cecile.” Other short stories have appeared in The Mississippi Review, The Brooklyn Review, and L Magazine, and have received finalist status in several contests. She received her BA from Yale and her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she now teaches undergraduate creative writing.

A lone American Indian woman confronts her past and present as the white settlers take over the land.

In the mid-1800s, Big Horse Woman of the Ponca Tribe and Magghie, daughter of German immigrants, are Seed Savers, medicine carriers, from different cultures, but with the same purpose. They keep the food, medicines and poisons of their place and time – in the seeds that they carry. As irrevocable tides of change sweep through their lives and the country, they realize that together they must save the seeds of plants that they fear will be lost.

Barbara Salvatore is owner and president of Beyond Design Inc., a company that specializes in fabrication services for Broadway, film, museums, and the art market. As well as running a farm in upstate New York, she maintains a studio in Nebraska, where the cultural and language research for this book was done.

Driftwood is a collection of short stories ranging from psychological realism to absurdist comedy to fairy tale to postmodern experiment to unclassifiable.

Nick Brown is a recipient of the 2007 Donald Barthelme Fellowship. The short story "The New Toothbrush" (from Driftwood) is forthcoming in Matchbook. Nick has an MFA from the University of Houston, and is an adjunct in the University of Houston system and a lecturer at Rice University.

Written with dark humor, The Mercy of Killing tells the story of Billie Girl’s life, from her infant adoption by two women (who are, unknown to all, brothers), to her final years as a resident in a nursing home where she secretly practices euthanasia as a kindness.

Vickie Weaver is a 2006 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her unpublished novel Below the Heart was a semi-finalist in the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction in 2008, and placed in the top ten of The Parthenon Prize 2007. Her short stories have appeared in Timber Creek Review, Roanoke Review, Alligator Juniper, and the anthology Women.Period. Weaver earned an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and teaches at Indiana University East. More at www.vickieweaver.com/index.html.

The Talking Cure is a collection of stories that probe the psychological dimensions of voicelessness and victimhood.

An eccentric Hollywood mother gives her deprived child a chance at a great life not by changing his circumstances, but by changing his story.

Candi Sary has written four other novels. Finding Grace made the short list for finals in the 2007 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition; Love Me Madly won second place in the 2007 Dahlonega Literary Festival Novel Contest; and The Sound That Red Makes and Thrown Away were finalists in the 2002 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.

A massive dam rises, a million lives are thrown in turmoil…and a widower saves an abandoned infant girl from the Yangtze.

Li Miao Lovett began her writing career after a 600-mile backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail where she encountered a stalker, a compulsive poet, and ten thousand mosquitoes. She has been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED Perspectives. Her literary and environmental writing has also been published by Narrative Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Stanford Magazine, China Rights Forum, and Sierra Club Planet. In both fiction and nonfiction, Li’s work has won awards or finalist standing from Stanford Magazine, National League of American Pen Women, and Dana Award in fiction. In the Lap of the Gods was a top-four finalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. More at http://www.limiaolovett.com/inthelapofthegods.html.

The story of Nick Danze, a young sex addict who returns to his hometown of Las Vegas to care for his emotionally ailing mother after his father's death.

Longing to Love You, a collection of short stories, won the 2009 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and is now forthcoming by Sarabande Books. It was also named a finalist for Black Lawrence Press’s Hudson Prize (2009), and a finalist for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference’s Katharine Bakeless Nason Fiction Prize. David Philip Mullins is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and North Dakota Quarterly, and have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has received awards from Yaddo and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing at Creighton University. More at mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/mullins.htm.

A collection of stories about people in peril who look for "miracles" to undo their knots of personal crisis, but, as in the fairy tales of old, the miraculous resolutions cause absurd, surreal, or unexpected consequences.

Ivan Faute has published short fiction in Other Voices, Buffalo Carp, The Louisville Review, Relief Journal, Driftwood, and The Orphan Leaf Review. Awards for his fiction include finalist for the Rannu Fund for Writers of Speculative Literature, second in the Crucible fiction prize, a finalist for The Southeast Review's World's Best Short Short Story Contest, and a nomination for a Pushcart Prize. Stories from Miracles have been published in a number of journals, including The Pinch, Karamu, The Mochila Review, The Abacot Journal, The Binnacle, and The Cerebral Catalyst, and in the anthology Touched by Wonder (Meadowhawk Press). Ivan is also a playwright, and has had plays performed in San Diego, Chicago, and New York. An excerpt from Miracles of the Non-Real World was named a finalist for the Calvino Prize and an honoree in The Binnacle Ultra-Short Competition. Ivan is in the final year of a PhD in writing at the University of Illinois.

Patrice: A Poemella is about the myth of art and artist and how a woman and man in a wartime setting pull truth and art from pain and desire.

Geri Gale’s major works include She, a collection of prosepoems told in the voices of women who are faithful and loyal to something or someone or someday; and a screenplay, Swayed, a coming-of-age tale about the innocence and love of two young lesbians growing up in a small Jersey town in the ’60s. Her prosepoems and stories have appeared in Otoliths, Raven Chronicles, and the Canadian Jewish Outlook.

The Changeling: A Dream of Love and Loss is a kind of magical explanation for a child's sudden onset of autistic behavior -- and the havoc it wreaks on his small family.

Rebecca Boroson is an editor and journalist who has won a number of journalism prizes for editorials, news, reviews, and headlines. The Changeling is the third novella in the “dream” series, in which fantasy and reality are entwined. Rebecca’s short story "The Roussalka" appeared in With Signs and Wonders: An Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), and has been told by storyteller Dan Yashinsky. He can be heard telling this story at http://tinyurl.com/pa5nwh.

THE GOSSIP’S CRIME is a collection of fabulist stories populated by uncanny characters – an oracular talking head, a women who burns, a lost forest monster, a dead baby resurrected, an obsessed virgin – narrated by a story-telling felon known as the Gossip.

Mary Overton is the secret identity of a school teacher camouflaged to fit into a conventional life. Her publications include the short-story collection The Wine of Astonishment (La Questa Press, 1997); short fiction in the anthologies Grace and Gravity (Paycock Press, 2004), Haunted Voices, Haunting Places (Halcyon Press, 2008), Great Writers Great Stories (IM Press, 1999) , and Southern Fried Weirdness 2007 (Southern Fried Weirdness Press); and short fiction in magazines including Glimmer Train, Gargoyle, Zahir, and Potomac Review.

Katrina Williams Jones Thomas Jackson Miller is a failed hooker, hotel maid, magician’s assistant, and ice cream truck driver presumed dead (only her hand was found after the hurricane). In the post-Katrina ghost town that was once the Ninth Ward, she paints murals over the red Xs left on houses to indicate the number of dead found inside. But soon she learns she’s not the only ghost in town.

Kelly Jameson is the author of the suspense-thriller Dead On, named Runner-Up in the 2006 Do It Yourself (DIY) Los Angeles Book Festival. Her short stories have been published in various online/print journals and magazines including The Summerset Review, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 8, Amazon Shorts, Withersin Magazine, The Twisted Tongue, Barfing Frog Press, The Big Stupid Review, Ruthie's Club, and The American Drivel Review. More at www.DeadOnNovel.com.