Each year the Tucson Festival of Books offers a writing contest led by Meg Files, a volunteer who has taught writing to generations of student in Tucson and beyond. Judged by authors presenting at the festival, the contest offers recognition to emerging talent in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction and Poetry. The top 50 contest entrants are invited to attend a Master's Workshop in Tucson facilitated by festival presenting authors on the Monday and Tuesday following the Tucson Festival of Books.
Congratulations to this year's winners and many thanks to our judges.
POETRY Judge: Jose Hernandez Diaz
First place: “Moon Roof” and other poems by Kateri Kosek North of Ferrisburgh, VT
Kateri Kosek is the author of “American Eclipse,” winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Poetry Prize, and a chapbook, “Vernal.” Her poetry and essays have appeared in such places as Orion, Terrain, Creative Nonfiction, and Northern Woodlands Magazine. A college English instructor and freelance journalist, she also serves on the board of the Center for Northern Woodlands Education. She holds an MFA from Western CT State University, and has been a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Kansas.
Judge: “Kateri Kosek weaves the magical and the mundane illuminating the light of the local landscape via poetic image and vivid observation. The poems are fierce and direct yet there is a keen precision, attention to line and form and haunting musicality.”
Second place: “This Body Is Not All That I Am” and other poems by Shagufta Mulla of Independence, OR
Shagufta Mulla is a Pacific Northwest poet and the art editor of Peatsmoke Journal. After practicing small animal veterinary medicine for 20 years, she became a freelance editor for books and online publications such as TIME's e-commerce section, TIME Stamped. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Passionfruit Review, Wild Roof Journal, Okay Donkey, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Crab Creek Review, Blood Orange Review, the speculative poetry anthology “NOMBONO” by Sundress Publications, and elsewhere. She was a 2024 winner in The University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Fifth Annual Haiku Hike, and she won Blood Orange Review’s 2021 poetry prize. In 2022, she was a semifinalist in Crab Creek Review’s poetry contest.
Judge: “Evocative poems that make us think, reimagine, inspire us. Mulla writes with sincerity and clarity but also pushes boundaries especially with line break and form.”
Third place: “Water Balm” and other poems by Isabel Lanzetta of Phoenix, AZ
Isabel C. Lanzetta's poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Oakland Arts Review, New Reader Magazine, Leviathan, Curios Magazine, and Convergence: Young Authors of Arizona, among others. She was nominated for a Best of the Net Award in 2024 and received the 2023 Emerging Writer Fellowship in Poetry from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, Colorado. She received her BA in English and Southwest Studies from Colorado College. She is currently receiving her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University.
Judge: “Striking work interested in introspection, light and wisdom. The poet does a great job of lulling the reader into their world/s.”
NONFICTION Judge: David Wright Faladé
First place: “One Pima Pilgrim” by D.A. Navoti of Seattle, WA
D.A. Navoti is a multidisciplinary storyteller, composer, and writer of the Gila River Indian Community. The author of essays, stories, and multimedia exhibits, his artistic work spans three landscapes — written, musical, and visual — a hybrid form exploring what it means to be Indigenous in the 21st century. The recipient of the 2022 Artist Trust Fellowship award and a 2022 Artist Support Program residency at Jack Straw Cultural Center, he also served as the 2022-23 Native-Artist-in-Residence at Seattle Rep. Previously, he was a writer fellow with Jack Straw Cultural Center and Hugo House, and his literary work has appeared in Homology Lit, Spartan, Indian Country Today, Cloudthroat, and elsewhere.
Judge: “‘The Man in the Maze’ movingly introduces us to family and community and place — to a People — all in a lyrical rumination on the echoes of time. ‘History doesn’t repeat itself,’ as Mark Twain remarked, ‘but it does rhyme.’ In this piece, the author seeks to understand his father, and in so doing he uncovers larger truths about himself.”
Second place: “Mothers and Manta Rays” by Tina Carlson of Santa Fe, NM
Tina Carlson has published 3 full length poetry collections, most recently, “A Guide To Tongue Tie Surgery,” winner of the 2024 NM/AZ Book award for poetry. Her chapbook, “Obsidian,” was published this year by Dancing Girl Press. She is an editor of the online journal Unbroken.
Judge: “A pointillist — almost surreal — lament to a dying mother and to fraternal loss, the complete picture just out of grasp, but keenly and profoundly felt. This short piece relies on illusive yet evocative images to raise its powerful song of grief.”
Third place: “Are You Two Sisters?” by Bonnie Hearn Hill of Fresno, CA
Bonnie Hearn Hill is the author of 16 traditionally published novels, as well as numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent publication was in the Anthony-winning anthology “Crime Hits Home: A Collection of Stories by Crime Fiction’s Top Authors”, edited by S.J. Rozan. She has co-hosted a Central California television news network’s monthly book segment since 2002. She holds an MFA degree from Antioch University Los Angeles.
Judge: “Another dirge, very different from ‘Mothers and Manta Rays’ and equally moving. In affecting, news-style prose, this paean to a lost friend — to a true sister, though not by blood — evokes Diana Marcum as only nonfiction can. No need to fictionalize in order to depict her richness and complexity; the full person comes alive in these pages.”
FICTION Judge: Jamie Quatro
First place: “Elephants on Parade” by April Darcy of Metuchen, NJ
April Darcy's fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Terrain.org, Water~Stone Review, Cutleaf, North American Review, and in Shenandoah, where she was the recipient of the Shenandoah River Fiction Prize. She has been the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and a 2022 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, both in support of a novel in progress, and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives and teaches creative writing in New Jersey.
Judge: “At first blush this story is a simple one: a young mother takes her three-week-old daughter and nine-year-old dog on a walk around their neighborhood. ‘Jessy had loved the dog slavishly, stupidly,’ we learn at the outset, ‘until two weeks ago, when she and Scott brought the baby home.’ Now this formerly-beloved dog is beginning to appear merely animal, horrifyingly canine. But the transition isn’t a simple one — the old love has not yet been replaced by the new. ‘Jessy did not love her baby,’ she admits to her mother. In a very small space, in lyrically compressed prose, this piece manages to capture the experience of new motherhood’s sheer liminality: Jessy is caught between allegiances, human and animal; between loves, husband and daughter; between bodies and careers and identities (‘My name is Jessy,’ she insists, when a local business owner calls her by her husband’s name.) And the baby, with her ‘elephant shoulders’ and ‘seashell ears’ — where does child begin and mother end, and vice versa? Is it possible to love anything with equality, once we become parents? A beautiful, heartfelt meditation on the ways motherhood intersects with the non-human animal kingdom.”
Second place: “Because of the People Who Like to Sell Buildings” by Kevin Hassett of Brooklyn, NY
Kevin Hassett is a bartender who plays in a band called Bad Head and is writing his first novel. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2021 with a bachelor's in creative nonfiction, won the 2020 Margaret C. Annan Memorial Prize for excellence in creative nonfiction, and was a finalist for New Letters' 2021 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction.
Judge: “I hardly know what to say about this piece, other than that the voice and the writing absolutely slap. The first-person narrator hooked me from the opening paragraph. I was disappointed when I finished and realized it was an excerpt from a novel. It isn't often that a narrative surprises me on every page, but this one did — each time I thought a sentence would zig, it zagged. This narrator is wildly off-kilter, somehow both arrogant and self-deprecating — ‘Tanya was beautiful and insane in a more pronounced and glamorous way than I was’ — the voice lyrically bonkers in a way that put me in mind of Denis Johnson’s F-head (the narrator of the stories in Jesus’s Son). I hope this book exists in full manuscript because I need to read it.”
Third place: “Werewolf” by Grace Glass of Frederick, MD
Grace Glass holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan. Her fiction features damaged characters whose flaws emerge in ordinary situations, preventing connection or growth. Her work has appeared in several journals, most recently including Toasted Cheese, South Carolina Review, Eclectica Magazine, and Bellevue Literary Review.
Judge: “This story takes us inside the mind of a man named Jason, who has a mental illness — unnamed, but likely schizophrenia — that manifests as the towering figure of a werewolf in ‘black pajamas studded with silver spikes, gears, and coils of wire.’ The story’s robust compassion for its characters, deft balance of horror and humor, and striking use of image (‘Rickie wore a peculiar smile, one that somehow reminded Jason of an empty intersection just before a car crash’) made this an easy pick for a winner.”
Stay up-to-date with all the latest news and information from the Tucson Festival of Books!
