2013 Prose Awards

Every fall we recognize outstanding short fiction and non-fiction from across the State of Illinois and award $250 cash prizes to one outstanding writer in each category. Please join us on October 23, 7:30 pm, at the Chopin Theater, located at 1543 W. Division Street, as we celebrate the authors at a special reading and award event featuring all six finalists.

Admission: $7 general and $5 students

 

NON-FICTION FINALISTS

Benjamin Capps for “Pigs, Dogs, and Guns”

JH Palmer for “How to Rescue a Feral Cat”

Gina P. Vozenilek for “Waxwing”

 

FICTION FINALISTS

Joseph Arzac for “Legacy”

Rebecca Keller for “Meals of a Lifetime”

Cyn Vargas “That Girl”

 

The 2013 Prose Awards were judged by Cristina Henríquez (fiction) and Miles Harvey (non-fiction). This year’s Prose Awards is sponsored in part by Wicker Park Bucktown, SSA #33. WPB SSA#33 is administered by the WPB Chamber of Commerce.

 

ABOUT THE FINALISTS

 

Joe Arzac is a strategic planning professional by day and a writer by night. He earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a finalist in the Rosemary Sazonoff Writing Contest. He is currently hard at work on a novel, an excerpt of which is titled “Legacy.”

 

Benjamin Capps studied theatre, coming to Chicago in 1999 to pursue stage, music and film.  He has produced seven short-films and several works on stage under the moniker, The Inner Below.  Benjamin also penned a collection of non-fiction works based on childhood traumas, of which his current piece is a part.

 

Rebecca Keller is an artist and writer. Her art is shown internationally, including next month at Chicago’s MCA. Her artwork and essays are featured in “Excavating History” (Stepsister Press). Her fiction has appeared in several literary journals, and earned the Joan Jakobsen Award (Wesleyan) and the Betty Gabehart prize.

 

J.H. Palmer co-produces the live lit series That’s All She Wrote, and has appeared at a number of live lit venues including: Story Club, Guts & Glory, 2nd Story, SKALD, Mortified, WRITE CLUB! and The Moth GrandSLAM. She is pursuing a Certificate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Chicago.

 

Cyn Vargas holds an MFA in Creative Writing- Fiction from Columbia College Chicago.  She received two top citations from Glimmer Train in their Short Story Award for New Writers contests. Her work’s appeared in Word Riot, Curbside Splendor, and elsewhere.  Writing’s her way of legally exposing herself in public.

 

Gina P. Vozenilek has an MFA from Northwestern and MA from U Iowa. One of her essays won the 2012 AWP Intro Journal Award and another was nominated for a Pushcart and was named Best of the Net by Sundress Publications. “Waxwing” is from her thesis, a collection of essays about place and identity.

 

PARTNER LINKS:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Wicker Park Bucktown SSA #33)

 

(Chopin Theatre)