The Guild Literary Complex is proud to announce the three semi-finalists from each category who will read their work at our Annual Prose Awards event.
Fiction
- Johnston Hill for “New Orleans and Anbar”
- Jami Nakamura Lin for “For My Father, with Whom I Am Quiet”
- John Wilmes for “Leonard and Maroon Boy”
Non-Fiction
- Xenia Ruiz for “Where There Is Love”
- Kristin Ginger for “What We Were Left With”
- Krystal Taylor Webb for “She Says She”
The recognition event will be held on Thursday, November 12, 2015, 7:30 pm, Chopin Theater, 1543 West Division Street, Chicago IL. The winner from the finalists will be announced live that evening. Admission is $8 general admission and $6 student admission at the door.
Every fall, the Guild Complex acknowledges emerging and established writers via a judged competition and recognition event at the historic Chopin Theatre in Chicago. A cash prize of $500 in each category (fiction and non-fiction) will be awarded. This year’s guest judges were Anne Calcagno (fiction) and S.L. Wisenberg (non-fiction).
2015 Prose Awards Judges
ANNE CALCAGNO is a dual-national, Chicago-based, award-winning author. Her books include the novel Love Like A Dog, the story collection Pray For Yourself, and the travelogue Travelers’ Tales: Italy. Love Like A Dog won First Place in the category First Novel from the New Generation Indie Book Awards, among other prizes. For stories in her collection Pray For Yourself, Anne received the San Francisco Foundation Phelan Literary Award, as well as an NEA and two Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowships. Her fiction has appeared in The North American Review, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, and a number of anthologies, including Don’t Tell Mama!, an anthology of Italian-American writing, In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland and Whose Panties Are These? More Misadventures from Funny Women on the Road. She won an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for her story ‘What’s Yours?’ published in Other Voices. She is currently at work on her second novel, Struck By Dina, about the Italian colonization of East Africa, and she teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
S.L. WISENBERG is the author of the nonfiction book The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, as well as the essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions and the short story collection The Sweetheart Is In. She has received a Pushcart Prize and awards and fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was a feature writer at the Miami Herald and has taught at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Her work has appeared in dozens of anthologies as well as magazines such as the New Yorker, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Creative Nonfiction. She served as creative nonfiction editor of ACM/Another Chicago Magazine, where she is now an editor emeritus. Wisenberg holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she teaches in the MA/MFA Writing Program at Northwestern University.