Congratulations to the winner and runner-up of Flyway’s 2014 Sweet Corn Short Fiction Contest!

Mike Alberti’s story “The Gully” was chosen by judge Dean Bakopoulos as our first-place winner. Bakopoulos called this captivating story, about coming of age in Colorado, “a beautifully pensive and lyrical story that understands the complexity of nostalgia — the unbridled human capacity to pine for a place we have fled, to simultaneously love and loathe a place with an intensity that is terrifying and dark.

Alberti is from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and is currently working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota, where he serves as managing editor of dislocate, the literary magazine based at his MFA program. As our first-place winner, Alberti will receive a prize of $500 and a box full of delicious Iowa sweet corn.

“Going It Alone,” Laura Price Steele’s story about the choices we do and don’t, can and can’t make, is this year’s Sweet Corn runner-up. Bakopoulos was impressed with Steele’s “convincing narrative voice that is equal parts melancholic and jaded,” and he found the story’s thread, which “lingers around the hard edges of being stuck, with its adrift narrator avoiding a complicated buried truth,” especially compelling.

As runner-up up, Steele will receive a prize of $50. She is originally from Denver, Colorado, and her work has been published in The Oval and Moment Magazine Online. She is currently pursuing her MFA at University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Look for these stories on Flyway’s homepage on July 15, 2014.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 2014 Sweet Corn Short Fiction Contest. It was a strong pool, and we at Flyway were impressed by and thankful for the good reading!

Finally, we’d like to offer up a special thanks to our excellent and assiduous judge, Dean Bakopoulus.

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