2024 TWFest Fiction Contest Finalists
Congratulations to our 2024 Fiction Contest Finalists. Thanks to our fiction judge, Margot Douaihy, and our contest coordinator, James Giltenan.
Pictured above from the top, left to right, our finalists are:
Genevieve Abravanel’s short fiction is available or forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Missouri Review, Story, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She has published a scholarly book with Oxford University Press (Chinese translation with The Commercial Press of Beijing) and received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Association of University Women. She teaches English in Lancaster, PA, where she lives with her family, and is currently working on a novel.
Jodie Childers is a New Orleans and Queens-based writer and documentary filmmaker. Her work has been published in Boulevard, The Hopkins Review, Poetry East, Jacobin, The Journal of Working-Class Studies, The Portland Review, Appalachian Reckoning, Slippery Elm, Eleven Eleven, Red Wheelbarrow, and Northern Appalachia Review, among others. She produced the documentary film The Other Parade, which aired on RTÉ in Ireland, and directed Down by the Riverside, which premiered at The Woodstock Film Festival. A Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University, she holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College and a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
RUNNER-UP: Bizzy Coy’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Vulture, The Belladonna, The Establishment, and Points in Case. Recent honors include a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, MacDowell Fellowship, and Individual Artist Grant from the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance. She received her MA in Creative Writing from Dublin City University and lives in upstate New York.
Michael Yates Crowley is a writer of novels, poems, and plays. His works for theater have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Berlin, Edinburgh and elsewhere. His play *TEMPING* has been performed over 1,000 times at venues including Lincoln Center, American Repertory Theater, and three sold-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He is a former NYFA Playwriting fellow and a graduate of the Lila Acheson Wallace Playwrights Program at Juilliard. Together with the director Michael Rau, he founded the narrative technologies company Wolf 359 (wolf359.org).
Devin Guimont lives in New Orleans with his partner, Ellie, and their dog, Crackers. Devin grew up in Maine, received his B.A. in Political Science at the University of Massachusetts | Boston, and his J.D. at New England Law | Boston. Devin currently works in medical contracting, and is an avid hiker and world traveler. He is brand new to fiction, and aspires to expand his writing skills in that area. Devin is excited and honored to be selected as a finalist in the TWFest Fiction Contest.
René Houtrides holds an MFA in writing from Bard College. Her stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Kestrel, The Vincent Brothers Review, and other publications. One of her Georgia Review stories was included in that journal’s 2011 retrospective of finest short stories from the past 25 years. She has received a New York Press Association award. Numerous of her essays have aired on WAMC Public Radio.
WINNER: K.W. Oxnard‘s fiction appears in literary journals such as Story, Mom Egg Review, Columbia Journal Online and Tahoma Literary Review, and in anthologies such as Draw Down the Moon from Propertius Press and Desire: Women Write About Wanting from Seal Press. In 2021, she won she won Honorable Mention in december Magazine’s Curt Johnson Prose Awards, and her work has also been shortlisted for the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award; the 2021 and 2020 Chester B. Himes Memorial Short Fiction Contests; the 2021 North Carolina Writers’ Network Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize; the Conium Review 2021 Innovative Short Fiction Contest; and the 2020 CRAFT Flash Fiction Contest, among many others. After many years teaching writing at the college level, she moved back to her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, where she lives and writes surrounded by Spanish moss and childhood memories. When not writing, she plays doting stepmama to two amazing young adults, bakes complex gluten-free desserts and watches the red-bellied woodpeckers dominate her feeder.
Lones Seiber is a retired aerospace engineer living in Morristown, Tennessee. His stories have appeared in GSU Review (now New South), The Pinch, Lynx Eye, The Wordstock Ten, Roanoke Review, Tall Grass Writers Anthology, Inkwell, Pearl, Nimrod, Indiana Review Pooled Ink, The New Guard, The Florida Review, and the Stories That Need To Be Told Anthology. His nonfiction has appeared in American Heritage. His awards also include the 2011 Warren Adler Prize for Fiction, the 2013 Roanoke Review Fiction Award and inclusion as one of twenty stories in The Best Mystery Stories of 2012 anthology published by Houghton Mifflin in October 2012. He also received the Leslie Garrett Award in Fiction offered by the Knoxville Writers Guild.
RUNNER-UP:Laura Price Steele has been the winner of Ploughshares’s Emerging Writer Contest in nonfiction as well as the Montana Prize in Fiction. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, CutBank, The Sun, and The Iowa Review, among others. She earned her MFA from UNCW. Currently, she lives in Missoula, Montana with her wife and two daughters.
