Contest Winners

Fall and Winter 2009
Volume 2 | Number 2
Grand Prize Winner:  Cinthia Ritchie / “Pig Road”

Cinthia Ritchie lives in Alaska, where she works as a journalist to support her poetry habit.  She’s a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of a Rasmuson Foundation fellowship, Alaska State Council on the Arts fellowship and has completed residencies at Hedgebrook and Hidden River Arts.  Her poetry and prose can be found in New York Magazine, Water-Stone Review, Under the Sun, Rainbow Curve, Slow Trains, Stirrings, Wicked Alice, PMS poemmemoirstory, and the anthology Women of the Web.  She’s working on a novel, when she isn’t out running in the mountains

Second Prize for Memoir in Prose or Poetry:
Marcia S. Popp / “what my father did and did not bring home in 1943”

Marcia is a retired university professor and the author of several textbooks and biographies.  Her first book of poetry, comfort in small rooms, was published this year by Black Zinnias Press.  The title poem from the book received the 2008 Robert Greer Cohn Prose Poetry Award, while “strike up the band”, another poem from the collection, was selected by poet laureate Mark Strand for Best New Poets 2008. Other poetry has appeared in Avocet, A Journal of Nature Poems.

Third Prize for Memoir in Prose or Poetry:
Liane Kupferberg Carter / “Love is Like This”

Liane Kupferberg Carter has been published in the New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Parents, Child, McCall’s, The Westchester Review, Sotto Voce, and Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Literary Mama.  She is working on an essay collection, Making Music Anyway: Raising a Child with Autism.  She lives in New York, where she is a community activist on behalf of children with special needs.

Prize for Graphic Memoir: 
Marguerite Dabaie / “The Making of a Woman Terrorist”

Marguerite Dabaie is a Palestinian-American raised in San Francisco on dolmas and hummous but also on manga and cheesy movies.  She attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and while there won two grants to create The Hookah Girl, a series of graphic novels about her experiences growing up as an Arab American.  The featured story in Memoir (and): Volume 2, Number 2 is an excerpt from that book.  She currently lives in Brooklyn.  http://hookah-girl.margoyle.net