2012 Prose Awards for Short Fiction and Non-Fiction – Recognition Event

The Guild Literary Complex’s Prose Awards (short fiction and non-fiction) help to surface emerging and mid-career prose writers and bring them to the public’s attention through an open call for submissions and judged competition. Past judges have included luminaries such as Stuart Dybek, Alex Kotlowitz, Antonya Nelson, and Sam Weller. On October 24, we will hold the Prose Awards’ final event: a showcase reading of this year’s semi-finalists, ending with the live announcement of the winner for the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories, both of whom will receive a cash prize of $250. This year’s semi-finalists and winners will be chosen by judges Amina Gautier and David Lazar (non-fiction). The recognition event is to take place at The Chopin Theater, 1543 West Division Street,  Chicago, IL.

About the Judges

Amina Gautier (fiction judge) Gautier follows in the footsteps of the late nineteenth century African American intellectual (Chesnutt, DuBois, Harper, and Hopkins) who merged both critical and creative talents. Her background as a scholar of 19th Century American literature and, more generally, African American literature combines with her training as a fiction writer such that she is both a critic and a creative writer, fully engaged in the analysis and creation of literature. More than sixty of her short stories have been published, appearing in Antioch Review, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, Pleiades, and Southern Review among others in addition to being anthologized in Best African American Fiction, Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years, New Stories From the South: The Year’s Best, 2008, The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Writers on Forerunners in Fiction, and Voices. Her fiction has been honored with the William Richey Prize, the Jack Dyer Award, the Danahy Fiction Award, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Award. Her short story collection At-Risk won the Flannery O’Connor Award and is published by University of Georgia Press.

David Lazar (non-fiction judge) Lazar’s books include The Body of Brooklyn and Truth in Nonfiction (both Iowa), Powder Town (Pecan Grove); Michael Powell: Interviews and Conversations with M.F.K. Fisher (both Mississippi). Forthcoming is Essaying the Essay from Welcome Table Press. His essays and prose poems have appeared widely in anthologies such as Understanding the Essay, An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Sentence), and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America, and magazines such as Gulf Coast, Black Clock, Sentence, Denver Quarterly, Best of the Prose Poem, Southwest Review, etc. and five of his essays have been “Notable Essays of the Year” according to Best American Essays. He created the undergraduate and Ph.D. programs in Nonfiction writing at Ohio University, and directed the creation of the undergraduate and M.F.A. programs in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika, now in its tenth year.