The 2021 Gulf Coast Prizes

Fiction Winner:
“But Mostly Weeding” by Leila Renee

Honorable Mentions:
“Loose Elephants” by Cristian Hernandez
"Beginning of What" by Sam Schieren

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, on the winner:
Great writing makes you feel. In Leila Renee’s incredible piece, "But Mostly Weeding," I was forced to feel a complex array of longing, anger, weariness, and hope. The prose crackled with wit and attentive sharpness and I felt myself genuinely caring about these characters and their outcomes. A beautifully told story.

Leila Renee is from Milwaukee, WI and is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where she received a Fulbright award to teach in South Africa. Her writing has appeared or will appear in Prairie Schooner, Harvard University’s Transition Magazine, Columbia Journal, Electric Literature, The Offing, Fjords Review, BLF Press, and other places. She is a current MFA in Creative Writing student at Syracuse University, where she is working on a novel and a story collection.

 

 

Poetry Winner:
"Anxiety" by Lisa Fay Coutley

Honorable Mentions:
“Love in a Time of Revolution” by Samyak Shertok
“Nazca Lines” by Elizabeth Robinson

Natalie Diaz, on the winner:
There is a compelling momentum occurring in the poem, a reciprocal slowing and quickening that offers neither rest or unrest, rather it creates a periphery or surround that is also a sensuality. These sensualities destabilize the body-body and the image-body, and require the non-human body in order to fully exist within the electric anxiety or worry. While it’s easy to pin anxiety to its negative associations, I found a lot of wonder in this poem, a reorganization of what it means to also eat while we evade, or imagine evading, what is hunting us. 

Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year Award, Errata (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award, and In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sewanee Writers' Conference, a Rona Jaffe scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize, selected by Dana Levin. Recent poetry and prose appears in Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Missouri Review, NELLE, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Waxwing. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry & Creative Nonfiction in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

 

 

Non-Fiction Winner:
“Dispatch from the Racial Mountain” by Alison Rollins

Honorable Mentions:
"Buried, Alive" by Katerina Ivanov Prado
“To Malik, with sanctified regret” by Caleb Gayle

Kiese Laymon, on the winner:
"Dispatch from the Racial Mountain" is the winner in the most incredible contest I've ever read for. We saw, and I’m still unsure how, a new reading of Morrison and Hughes, and this remix of the traditional notion of a peak at the top of a generational climb. This would be enough, but the language is as agile and dexterous as I've read in a long time. And it lands brilliantly with a boom, a thump and a hiss I hear weeks after I finished the work. Flat out future classic.

Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis city, is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, the New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow, she is a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. In 2018, she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award; and in 2020, the winner of a Pushcart Prize. She has held faculty as well as librarian appointments at various institutions including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Colorado College, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her debut poetry collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press) was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. She is currently pursuing a Literary Arts MFA at Brown University.

 

 

Entries for Gulf Coast Prizes in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry are accepted annually between February 15 and April 15. The contest awards $1,500 and publication in Gulf Coast to the winner in each genre. Two honorable mentions in each genre are awarded $250. All entries are considered for publication and the entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black. Originally from Spring Valley, New York, he graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Literary Hub, the Paris Review, Guernica, and Longreads. He was selected by Colson Whitehead as one of the National Book Foundation's “5 Under 35” honorees, is the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book and the Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Natalie Diaz is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press, and her second book, Postcolonial Love Poem,  was published by Graywolf Press in March 2020. She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow, a United States Artists Ford Fellow, and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. Diaz is Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Kiese Laymon is a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, and author of the bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir. Laymon is a Contributing Editor at Vanity Fair and Oxford American. He has written for New York Times, Esquire, VSB, ESPN The Magazine, the Paris Review, NPR, Colorlines, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Ebony, Guernica, Fader, Travel & Leisure, Lit Hub, and many others. He is the Hubert H. McAlexander Chair of English at the University of Mississippi, and recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard.