Barthelme Prize for Short Prose

Congratulations to the winner and honorable mentions for the 2022 Barthelme Prize, judged by Vi Khi Nao!

2022 Winner:
"Anatomy in Empty Apartment" by Katherine Mooney Brooks

Honorable Mentions:
"Your Best American Girl" by Helena Li
"Five Strange Things That All Fell from the Sky" by Peter Pilcrow

Vi Khi Nao, on the winner: 
In this triptych, the writer captures depth of grace with achingly serpentine, melancholic, and biblical splendor. “Anatomy in Empty Apartment” takes you to tender, yearnful, anatomical places that only exist on the fringe of heartbreaks. 

Katherine Mooney Brooks received her MFA in poetry and nonfiction from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as managing editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. Brooks has previously received a Sewanee Writers’ Conference MFA scholarship in poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Image, Tusculum Review, and West Trade Review. She is the Director of Education at the Science Museum of Western Virginia.

Thanks to everyone who submitted to the 2022 Barthelme Prize! The winner will appear in the print edition of Gulf Coast 35.2, available Spring 2023. 

Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931–July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

 

Vi Khi Nao

Vi Khi Nao

VI KHI NAO is the author of six poetry collections & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Swimming with Dead Stars. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her collaborative work, That Woman Could Be You, with Jessica Alexander arrives in April 2022 from BlazeVOX. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www.vikhinao.com