2023 BLR Prize Winners
We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2023 BLR Literary Prizes. More than 1,000 writers sent us their best work, and it was incredibly difficult to choose. The winning pieces will be published in Issue 44 of BLR, in the spring of 2023. We are indebted to our three judges and all of the writers who participated.
Goldenberg Prize for Fiction
Judged by Toni Jensen
Winner: “In Another Life” by Lara Palmqvist
Honorable Mention: “Aspen” by Karen K. Ford
Lara Palmqvist‘s writing appears in The Southampton Review, Witness Magazine, and Southern Indiana Review, among other publications. Winner of the 2019 Mary C. Mohr Award in Fiction, she is also the grateful recipient of awards and fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Saari Residence in Finland, the Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, the Rotary Global Grant program in Sweden, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, through which she taught creative writing in Ukraine. Originally from New Mexico, she currently lives in Austin, Texas, where she is a Fiction Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers.
Karen K. Ford is an award-winning author of short fiction whose honors include top fiction prizes from Narrative and bosque (the magazine). Her work has been shortlisted for the Tobias Wolff Fiction Award from the Bellingham Literary Review and the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize and has been anthologized in Ginosko. She is a freelance editor and writing coach who leads a fiction workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Karen lives in Costa Mesa, California, with her rescue mutt, Dude.
Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction
Judged by Rana Awdish
Winner: “Lost Vessels” by Jehanne Dubrow
Honorable Mention: “Your Cane” by Sabah Parsa
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (Louisiana State University Press, 2021), and two books of creative nonfiction, throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019) and Taste: A Book of Small Bites (Columbia University Press, 2022). Her third book of nonfiction, Exhibitions: Essays On Art & Atrocity, will be published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2023. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas.
Sabah Parsa was born in New York City and raised in Sterling, Virginia. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in English and American Literature from NYU in 2020 and attended the inaugural Tin House autumn workshop in 2022. She currently resides in Brooklyn, where she writes both fiction and nonfiction pieces.
John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry
Judged by Phillip B. Williams
Winner: “Etymology of Chlorophyll” by Caroline Harper New
Editors’ Choice Honorable Mention: “There Is No Time Here” by Karan Kapoor
Caroline Harper New is a writer and visual artist from Bainbridge, Georgia. Her writing reckons with motherhood, ancestry, and natural disaster in the Gulf Coast, and is grounded in an academic background in anthropology. Her poetry can be found in American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Southern Humanities Review, PRISM International, and Ruminate, and she is the 2022 winner of the 2022 Robert & Adele Schiff Award. New is currently on a Zell Fellowship at the University of Michigan and serves as the Dzanc Writer-in-Residence in Ann Arbor, MI. More can be found at www.carolineharpernew.com
Karan Kapoor is a poet based in New Delhi. Winner of the Red Wheelbarrow Prize, a finalist for the Literary Taxidermy Competition, Ledbury Poetry Prize, and Julia Darling Memorial Prize, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plume, Rattle, Colorado Review, Humber Literary Review, Frontier, New Welsh Review, and elsewhere. You can find him at: karankapoor.co.in
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