Fifth Wednesday is happy to announce both the winners of the 2011 Editor’s Prize as well as the guest editors for our Spring 2012 issue.
First, let’s get to the winners…
Poetry:
Winner: “Alphabet of Eels” by Norman Lock
Published in the Fall 2010 edition of Fifth Wednesday, “Alphabet of Eels” was selected by judge Natania Rosenfeld out of sixty-seven published poems. On the poem, Rosenfeld said:
Rarely is a prose poem as rhythmic as this one, and the alliteration is fine, clever, never cloying: “the sprat prized by penurious Londoners” spits itself out subtly (quite a feat); “words both rare and radiant, which to pronounce was to explicate” is at once stately and concise.
Lock has many previous publications and has published nine novels from a variety of presses.
Photography:
Winner: “The Gaze (London, 2009)” by Jessica Hubbard Marr
Chosen out of 26 published photographs, “The Gaze (London, 2009)” was selected by Jeff Curto. On his choice, Curto claimed:
“The Gaze (London, 2010)” cuts to the essence of what photography is all about. For me, photography is about the act of looking on an intense level. It’s a very specific sort of pointing at something and imploring, “Look; this is interesting.”
The photograph featured a young boy, fixing his gaze on another photograph. Marr is currently pursuing a Masters in the history and theory of photography in Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London.
Fiction:
Winner: “The Plane of Primary Focus” by Jonis Agee
Agee is the author of thirteen books, three of them named Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. Judge Edie Meidav said of her decision:
Right when you think you know where this chatty aggrieved narrator, who holds you tight by the lapels, has her sights fixed, you find she and Agee have placed you in a completely different room. If fiction is a house, as Henry James suggests, Agee’s story would be like that of the famously nutty widow, somewhere near San Jose, California, who kept crafting additions to her house which were, essentially, architectural red herrings: closet doors opening to nothing, stairways doubling upon themselves. By Agee’s story’s end, we swallow, along with our surprising narrator, a lump in the throat.
And, now on to the fabulous guest editors of ’12!
Donna Seamen, Fiction
Seamen has a laundry list of impressive credentials. A senior editor of Booklist, a book critic for Chicago Public Radio, and a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Kansas City Star, and more, she is well-qualified to edit the fiction for our upcoming issue. Seaman’s essays and interviews have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, F Magazine, and TriQuarterly.
Kevin Stein, Poetry
Stein is well-published, author of ten books of poetry and criticism. He also has experience editing, recently working on two anthologies of Illinois poetry. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and TriQuarterly.
