Winner - 2023 Plentitudes Prize in Nonfiction
Finalist - 2023 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Contest
Long-listed - 2023 Fish Short Memoir Prize
Long-listed - 2023 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award
Judge: Nigel Collett, author of The Butcher of Amritsar, Firelight of a Different Colour, and A Death In Hong Kong.
Special Awards Issue Spring 2023
We all of us like to believe, now and again, when the body blooms with the vigor of the earth, that the whole of who we are is an ex nihilo creation, that we sprout up like mushrooms after rain, fresh from out the mind of the Almighty. But then you stub the toe or crack the knuckle or rub the palm of the hand up over the brass marker atop a grave and wham, there you go again, back into the skin you got from all the kin that come before, the flesh and the blood at the start of it all.
Winner - 2022 Hunger Mountain Short Fiction Prize
Pushcart Prize Nominee
Hunger Mountain Review Issue #27
Judge: Adam McOmber, author of Fantasy Kit, Jesus & John, and The Ghost Finders.
So into the trap, the honeytrap, the cathedral we tumbled. In my pocket I carried a stick of gum. You chew till it’s soft, then slap the wad onto any exposed surface of the robot skin. Ibid says it’s got the power to kill the hunger, obliterate the algorithm that gives it a will. That little masterful trick it plays -- surfing out over an ocean of code to hijack a robo-mower, welder-bot, paramedical droid – is the very thing that makes it vulnerable to a counterattack. To live in a world of stones and bones and flesh and blood, you gotta touch and taste and smell, you gotta gather up the flavor of the day. Hidden in the flavor of the gum? The killer code.
Third Place - Action/Words Poetry Contest
Judge: Ruth Awad, author of Outside the Joy and Set to Music a Wildfire
Midway Journal Volume 18, Issue 2
The first man to fall into the sun
Novel: The Slapjack
Winner - 2021 First Pages Prize
Judge: Lan Samantha Chang, Director of The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, author of The Family Chao, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.
Entrants are judged on the first 2,250 words of a book-length manuscript
An abandoned boy with a brutal past hobos south to partner with a bitter beauty, Maggie, who loves to fight everyone everywhere and for every reason, but has yet to find the answer to this simple question: how do a pair of loners learn the ways of love?
A stripling is all he was, but it took two to hold him. Squirrely kid. Took a blast of birdshot to bring him down. Square in the back. A punch enough to bloody him up is all, ventilate that shirt of his. The bearded fella hooked a finger in a hole, gave it a yank and, in a single stroke, tore the fabric aside.
“Hold him down.”
“He’s just a boy.”
“Hold him.”
Third Place - Masters Review 2021 Novel Excerpt Contest
Judge: Dan Chaon, author of Sleepwalk, Ill Will, Await Your Reply, and Stay Awake
Fall 2022 Master’s Review Online
Chapter Five: A Citizen True
Chapter Six: The Hammer Of God
Chapter Seven: A Person Of No Account
“This excerpt is something of a wild card since it starts at chapter 5… yet the voice won me over—the unique and surprising vernacular, the grinning energy of the prose, the enthusiastic sense of scene and detail. I don’t know whether I yet know what this book is about, but based on these pages I’m willing to keep reading!” [Contest Judge Dan Chaon]
Runner Up
The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2023
Short-Listed - 2022 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Prize
Jan/Feb 2023 Saturday Evening Post Online
What with that daddy of his already a dead letter in a box or a bar or a field aways off over the horizon, Sparrow took to sleeping in the storeroom GB’d occupied back in the day. Sixteen he was. Ripe. Ready. And the girl? A barefoot jobber on the overland path, back and forth every day between a shack in the woods and a grove in the season of harvest. From out a family of scrappers she come, seven children and she in the middle somewhere, the whole enterprise a tumbleweed of tinder and chaff. Not what you’d call a pretty girl, but then again Sparrow not the face on the box of Wheaties or the mug on the cover of True Romance. Serviceable is what they were. He come across her in the spring, at the side of the trail they run up the bed of the old rail line from Brooksville to Ocoee, pitching rocks at a couple boys been ragging her bout the lack of shoes. A good arm. Threw like a man.
Finalist - Terrain.org’s 13th Annual Fiction Contest
Finalist - Sunspot Lit Rigel Contest
Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award For Fiction 2022
Short List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022
February 2023 Terrain.org online
The steeple glowed at the fringe of the wood. The moonlight struck the bell as they neared the chapel.
Eva bid them wait. So not to make a scene, that was the plan, so not to, as it were, catch them in the act, no, but to capture the act and, in the afterwards, in the telling, multiply the moment over and over again. And who better than Eva to bear witness? Eva the one to see – as in a vision – the sin. Eva the one to hear, from miles away, the thump-thump-thump of the flesh.
First Runner Up
The Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest 2021
Finalist - 2020 Orison Anthology Award In Fiction
Short Listed - 2020 Bridport Short Story Prize
One night only! The Human Torpedo! Captain Jimmie Jameson!
The truck tinkled as it wheeled left and then right to clear the surge of the gutters and the muddy bubble of the manholes, a carillon of ice cream, ice cream, ice cream cast up and then erased with every random gust.
From a ten-story tower he jumps – no parachute, no hooks, no wires – he jumps!
The trumpet shook as the truck rammed a broken deck chair and splintered up over the shingles and the rafters and the crackly wire that clogged the square. Talk about balls. You could even hear, up under the garglish warble of the busking – Ten stories! Ten stories! Into a puddle of water no bigger than a bathtub! – the tremor in his voice, the thrill of – what would be the word for it? -- death. Even the oldsters – and by now we were the oldsters – felt, in the wake of the storm, the frisson, the sting of doom in the air, the roof jarred and the tree toppled and the midnight pitch of the shutter upward, up over the clouds, ascended into heaven.
Finalist - New Ohio Review Editor’s Prize - Short Story
New Ohio Review Online Summer Exclusive 2019
Fiction Finalist 2019 New Millennium Writing Awards
Maggie meet Joe. Joe—new in town. Regular enough, the features, but more an approximation of handsome than the thing itself, stencil of a stencil, carnival swag, paraffin bust of a Barrymore or a Valentino.
Joe meet Maggie. Maggie—the hubby dead or run off with another woman (she’d never say, we’d never ask) but she keeps the ring alright, and not in a box either, but right up there over the fist as a kind of a—what do you call it?—visual aid for the occasional moron foolish enough to try to sweeten, not the coffee, but the server. You don’t mess with Maggie.
Runner-Up - 2019 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize
Overland Magazine Online Autumn 2020
A hunk of junk? No, says he. A canvas. The canvas upon which the pictures appear, the sine qua non of the whole shebang, a vasty slab of nothing the prisoners – to consecrate them, said Barnett, to a higher calling – painted with barrels of (courtesy Florida Department of Transportation and a cousin with a set of keys) dotted-line-down-the-center-of-the-highway white. Barbasol white. Pepsodent white. Not merely an erasure of what came before but a fearsome white that blazes back at the onlooker, that simmers in the blue of the day and phosphors out into the chill of the night.
The Postcard From Nowheres-ville we called it. Barnett smiled and spread his arms wide, as if to absorb through the pores of his shirt the smell of the luminous paint. This was the bank shot he’d set into motion months – no, centuries – no, eons ago.
Finalist - Fall 2019 Travel Writing Contest (Fiction)
Nowhere Magazine Online
Barnett that son of a bitch. He saw an opportunity and he took it, shook it, vacuumed up every divot of property from Sop-Choppy to Clermont not already fuzzed over with cattle and oranges.
We could’ve stopped him if we’d of only known back at the beginning, back when he was a boy. But how do you look out for a nothing, for a puff of air? Up from out of an anthill he’d come, that day he arrived among us, up from out a province no bigger than the print of a shoe, and nothing to recommend him, as if nothing were a thing of its own, a propulsive force, a bubble in the deep of the sea.
Finalist - Terrain.org’s 12th Annual Fiction Contest
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2022
Terrain.org online February 2022
On the plank in the crown of the cypress, under the tarp that splits the wind and parries the sun, lies a man all beat to hell. Beat but on the mend. Green again. Grateful, and like any other man who ever lived, a cosmos in the making. So it seemed to GB. Awake or asleep, ragged or spruce, horny or hale or all beat to hell and back again, it don’t matter he figured, it’s all the same: every day you wake, and poke your nose up out the bedcovers, and discover you ain’t dead yet, that day’s the day God said Let there be light. The first day of creation.
Winner - Fall 2019 PNM Flash Fiction Contest [Press 53]
Prime Number Magazine Issue 173, Apr-Jun 2020
The perfect parcel, and there for the picking, and Cooper there ripe in the saddle, not but a breeze away from that final, stiff-of-the-finger topple into the plowable turf.
Winner - 2022 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize
Upcoming The Thomas Wolfe Review Fall 2022
“This story is beautifully written and filled with sensory details that draw into both the physical and emotional landscapes of the story right away. It certainly reminds me of what Faulkner said about Wolfe putting the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin in its intense use of language.”
Judge: Crystal Wilkinson, author of The Birds of Opulence, Water Street, and Blackberries, Blackberries.
Winner - 2022 PNM Flash Fiction Prize [Press 53]
Finalist - Indiana Review 2020 1/2 K PRIZE
Finalist - Cutbank Literary Journal — Big Sky, Small Prose Contest
Finalist - Tobias Wolff Award For Fiction 2022
Prime Number Magazine Issue 229, Oct-Dec 2022
T-Minus 300,000 years. A hundred million years of coral bakes in the sun. The condor wheels out over the sandstone cliff to strike at the hide of the mammoth. The beast bellows. The sinkhole blossoms. The earth feeds.
Winner - Driftwood Press 2019 Adrift Short Story Contest
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020
Nominated 2020 Best of the Net
Judge: Dale Ray Phillips, author of Pulitzer Prize Nominee My People’s Waltz
Driftwood Press Winter 2020 Issue 7.1
Farrel marched himself up the aisle and into the dock. Farrel-land the children called it, the patch of the flooring at the far corner of her desk where he stood to attention day after day, two, three times a day to once again—as Miss Connor called it—explain himself. A haven. A land of milk and honey. He’d rest his chin on the wooden edge of the desk while he waited for her to rule, smell the varnish and the Pinesol and the coffee, rock his head from side to side, sticky up onto his cheeks the pencil shavings and the diblets of rubber eraser as he watched and as he waited. It was all of it familiar, homey even, the spot on the floor. His spot. Here. Where the bad children stand to await the day of judgement, where the soles of their feet sand the tile down to a tar the width of a cookie.
Winner - 2019 Texas Observer Short Story Contest
Judge: Fernando A. Flores, author of Tears of the Trufflepig
Texas Observer November/December 2019 Issue
Outstanding Features
With an opposable thumb, eight pounds of cortical tissue (fully loaded), and a 357 eight-cylinder fuel-injected engine, I come fully equipped for either work or play. Pressed for time? I cut overhead by downsizing hourly, doubling my memory even as I pack more of myself into a smaller and smaller space.
Zap. I am the size of a grapefruit, and fit quite nicely tucked into the corner of your attaché case or anchoring that stack of invoices on your credenza. Zap. I am the size of a bumblebee and perch inside your left ear whispering sweet nothings as day gives way to night. Zap-zap. I’m an ICBM sprouting up through an Iowa cornfield, a million pounds of thrust sucked into a bright red button quivering beneath the manly but well-manicured thumb of Robert H. Gottlieb. Zappitty-zap. A plate of linguini Alfredo in a white clam sauce. A—zap—hand-tooled leather sombrero. Zap—a kitten—zap—a samurai sword—zap—a candy-red Maserati convertible. Do you like breasts? I can grow breasts. I am all that you have ever wanted and more.
Pushcart Prize Nominee 2018
New Ohio Review Fall 2018
Finalist - 51st New Millennium Writing Awards 2021
The .45. Strange to see it here, here in his hand. He checked the safety. Slipped it into the outside pocket of the leather jacket, just under the flap. Only once before had I ever seen him hold it. Couple years ago he’d run us out to the sandpit for the demo and the speech (this is not a toy). Taught us how to load and unload, to blast a bottle off a fence—the basics, right? Like the sex talk, you know—you get the one lesson (this is not a toy) and then, that’s it, go ye forth and multiply.
Winner — Sterling Clack Clack Fiction Contest April 2021
Finalist – 2019 Barry Hannah Prize In Fiction Yalobusha Review
Short Listed — 2020 Gulf Stream Summer Fiction Contest
The Hawaiian Club will be arriving at 6 pm and it is already 5:55 pm. I hurry back to the bedroom to strip off my clothes and to cover my body with coconut oil and even though when I put my clothes back on again they will not know what I have done, I feel pleased for myself that I have done it and that in a sense there is a part of this island of Hawaii that I carry with me on the secret island of my own individual skin.
Winner - The Westchester Review 2020 Flash Fiction Contest
Featured in Westchester Review Volume 11, Issue 1 May 2020
The cantaloupes dangle in the sack. How strong the man must be to hold it so. His knuckles waver with the weight, but the strain he feels (he waits with his shoulders back, like a soldier) he feels because he loves the woman. The love is like the earth that pulls at him, waking or sleeping, sitting or standing, at a walk or at a run or even now, as it were, at ease.
Finalist - Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open June 2013
Finalist - 2015 Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Featured in Hunger Mountain Journal Online
I can’t seem to unstick myself from the shoulders of the people around me. Wildebeest stampeding up a riverbank, that’s what we are — I think as I break stride, as I fall back a step — meals on wheels. And that’s when the guy with the clipboard hooks me by the sleeve. You’ve seen the documentary. It’s always the infant, the aged, the injured the croc strikes first. Says he’s got tickets to a show — focus group screening, CBS sitcom, invitation only.
Invitation? For me? Population of a whole village flits by in the second it takes me to scratch my nose. The earth skids on another thousand miles through the black. The odds are astronomical. That I should be the one grain of pollen plucked out of this avalanche and held aloft for all to see, that I should find myself a member of that most exclusive of all clubs, the Random Sample?
Online Exclusive at Boulevard Magazine - Natural Bridge collection
Finalist - Arkansas Emerging Writers Award 2021
Long List - Fish Short Story Prize 2021/2022
With a magazine and a strip of duct tape, the detective—the nice one, the one with the crisp in the collar and the delicate hands—dabs the cut on your brow with a Q-tip and rigs up a splint to cradle the break in your wrist. He stands behind you, at the ready, should you need a pat on the shoulder, a swig of water, a smoke. The other detective—the gruff one—kicks back in the corner with his feet up top a trashcan flipped, upside-down, to make a stool. With his teeth he tears the head off a packet of salted peanuts.
Winner - Lazuli Literary Group Summer 2022 Writing Contest
Third Place - Typehouse 2019 2nd Biennial Short Fiction Contest
Typehouse Literary Magazine Issue #18
“This is one of the most audacious works I’ve seen in a while, delightfully reckless and unhinged.” Contest Judge Venita Blackburn, author of Black Jesus and Other Superheroes
Upcoming Volume 6, Issue 2 of AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought
Dear Mr. Fred Biedeblieck,
Congratulations. Your reputation precedes you. Your life-long effort to make an impression upon those more fortunate than yourself has not gone unnoticed.
When word of your existence reached our international headquarters on the outskirts of Monte Carlo, we knew then that our search for a subscriber to this most exclusive of all magazines was at an end.
Winner - Gateway Review Flash Fiction Contest
Featured in The Gateway Review Winter 2019
Online reprint at Fresh.ink Literary
Like a portable cathedral is what the famous people are, buoyant is what they are, the famous people, and lighter than air and – look -- into the blue cavern of a cloud they float, bingo, tally-ho, cowabunga, yes, but beware.
Online at Sterling Clack Clack (J.New Books)
Fold-Out Chapbook (A3 Press - Illustrations by Andrew Torrens)
Printed on 170gsm Silk paper and 350gsm card in England.
I will have the baco-burger combo special, one for me and one for my new car. No, no: do not roll the window down. Slide it in through the vent. We do not wish to break the exquisite aerodynamic profile of this, our recently purchased motoring vehicle.
How extraordinarily handsome he is at the wheel of his handsome new car. He is a go-getter, he is a sexual object, he is a gigantical rumbling four-door erection.
Hey, baby. Hubba-hubba. Yowsa-yowsa. She is dazzled by the fine flashy looks of my brand new car. "If I had a kind of a car like that," she says, "I would not have any need for a pair of legs."
Winner - 2014 Knickerbocker Prize (Novella)
Featured in Big Fiction Magazine #6
Alan Sincic’s incantatory “The Babe” is voice-driven and manic and funny and dark and loud. It’s fantastical.
David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals
“He dies. That’s the first line, so I’m not spoiling anything: Babe Ruth dies. What happens in the next 61 pages takes us only to the end of the day, but it takes us everywhere in baseball, in competition, in love, in language, the most fluid flowing catch and pitch of wordage and outage (or not) you can imagine. Two sentences, just to reel you in:
So much for the bubble that held the game. But then he looked back at the break in the fence and saw that it was perfect: a breach in the boundary of the game just big enough to contain not only the Babe but also the ball there bounding down the cobbled streets of the Bronx, the ball spinning into and out of the broken sunlight to spank the hood of the roadster, to rainbow up over the boaters and the derbies and the bonnets, to nip the tip of the stogie and ping the arm of the hydrant and hop the stoop and shatter the window and clatter the spoons and splatter the pans in a rebound, in a ricochet, in a bank shot to the bedroom where the widow would be waiting, all crispy and frisky and fried . . .
You get the idea, right? What happens to the ball if the Babe dies? This is what happens—Alan Sincic takes you from the windup to the final call on Home Run 715, and you can hardly stop to breathe. It’s terrific.”
Julie J. Nichols, New Pages
Finalist - 2013 Cobalt Writing Prize
Featured in Cobalt Review (Volume Two) 2014
Fresh Ink Reprints May 14, 2020
Fresh.ink Online Literary Magazine
In order to be attractive to the ball, it is important for you to look as much like a ball as possible. Since you are what you eat, we suggest as many sphere-icular foods as possible: cheese balls, gumballs, sourballs, crème-puffs, bon-bons, chocolate-covered ho-ho's. Be creative. Don’t be afraid to vary your training program by expanding beyond the six major food groups listed here. This is what is known as “having a good range.”
S for Sentence
A terrific website that gathers commentary from writers about the “sentence-building” of writers they admire.
Poets think in lines, prose writers in sentences; the best of both work from sound to sense, with an ear for the music in their compositions. S for Sentence celebrates lyricism in prose, the play and craft at work in the artful sentence. We post a sentence a month along with comments by a guest writer on the craft that shapes it, on what makes it great. In one or two sentences.
—Pearl Abraham, Editor