Announcing the 2022 Cleaver Flash Contest Winners and Finalists
WINNERS & FINALISTS
CLEAVER’S 2022 FLASH CONTEST
Winners, Honorable Mentions, and finalists will be published in Cleaver’s Issue No. 40, our 10th-anniversary issue
Judge: Meg Pokrass
We writers know how this goes… We submit our work to a literary contest. We wait. We wonder if the readers felt moved in all the right places; if they were engaged, intrigued, enlivened… We know how many fine talents are out there, and the process of waiting to hear back is not fun. As a contest judge who is also a devoted writer of the form, I take it strongly to heart.
The strength and integrity of the stories I read blew me away. As in any high-level literary contest, there were vastly different approaches to telling a story: There were flashes where the narrative lived right on the surface and others which offered skilful clues, and where the author trusted the reader implicitly. There were stories that showed the reader everything and stories that gave away nothing. Some characters were minimally drawn; others were created in microscopic detail. Some held me tightly in their grip all the way through yet lost me as late as the final sentence. There were some powerful themes including relationship breakdowns, racism, homelessness, strained parent and child connections.
It was only after rereading the stories for a number of weeks that my favorites became clear. Ultimately the winners were the ones that inexplicably moved me emotionally above everything else, and that I kept re-engaging with, trying to figure out how the writer worked their magic. It became a matter of recognizing that certain pieces had chosen me, not the other way around.
—Meg Pokrass, October, 2022
First Place: Sabrina Hicks
“When We Knew How to Get Lost”
Sabrina Hicks lives in Arizona with her family. Her work has appeared in Five South Journal, Flash Frog, Pidgeonholes, Trampset, Monkeybicycle, Reckon Review, Split Lip, Milk Candy Review, with stories included in Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. More of her work can be found at sabrinahicks.com.
◊
Second Place: Janet Burroway
“The Tale of Molly Grimm”
Janet Burroway is the author of nine novels including The Buzzards; Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of The New York Times Book Review). Her Writing Fiction is now in its tenth edition, and Imaginative Writing is soon to be published in its fifth edition. She is the author of the memoir Losing Tim and the winner of the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing from the Florida Humanities Council. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at the Florida State University.
◊
Third Place: Dawn Miller
“The Egg”
Dawn Miller’s most recent work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Lit, Typehouse, Jellyfish Review, Guernica Edition’s This Will Only Take a Minute anthology, and The Maine Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in Picton, Ontario, Canada. Connect at www.dawnmillerwriter.com and on Twitter @DawnFMiller1
HONORABLE MENTION
Laura Tanenbaum
Fannie H. Gray
Andrea Marcusa
Lisa Lanser-Rose
Andrew Stancek
Emily Hoover
James LaRowe
Paul Enea
Kris Willcox
Christina Simon
FINALISTS
Theo Greenblatt
Meredith McCarroll
Amanda Hadlock
Madeleine Barowsky
K Moore
Ron Tobey
Sarah Freligh
Nicholas Claro
Joe Artz
Lyn Chamberlin
Flash Contest Judge MEG POKRASS is the founding editor of Best Microfiction and the author of nine collections. Her work has appeared in over a thousand literary journals. Her flash fiction, “Back on the Chain Gang” will appear in The Best Small Fictions 2022, and another flash fiction story, “Pounds Across America” will appear in a new Norton anthology Flash Fiction America, edited by James Thomas, Sherrie Flick and John Dufresne, in 2023.