Pleiades Press is pleased to announce Calabash Stories by Jeffrey Higa was selected by C.J. Hauser as the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize and will be published in 2021. C.J. Hauser praised the book, writing, “I was enchanted by Calabash Stories. This collection is full of small Márquezian marvels: an ice-maker wheeled down a too-narrow Hawaiian road on roller-skates, a shadow portrait artist turned labor organizer undercover in plantation death camps, a villainous chicken entrepreneur, a cover band singer with a flair for miracles, and a grandmother managing a bad news bears baseball team. There is so much humor and heartbreak and humanity in these stories–not to mention so much style and gravitas. I hope Jeffrey Higa will be writing us stories for many years to come– I, for one, will be rooting for him loudly.”
Thank you to all entrants of the Robert C. Jones Prize.
C.J. Hauser named Life, After by Ernest J. Finney as Honorable Mention.
We also would like to commend the other finalists and semi-finalists, whose manuscripts in our opinion were all outstanding and publishable.
Finalists: Bradley Bazzle, Lucy Bryan, Elizabeth Genovise, Mimi Kawahara, Maureen McCoy, Rachel Luria, and Alan Sincic
Semifinalists: Brett Biebel, Steve Edwards, Tyler McAndrew, Andrew Siegrist, Adam Schwarts, and Gina Troisi
Jeffrey Higa is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright whose stories have appeared in the North American Review, Zyzzyva, Sonora Review, Bamboo Ridge, and others. In 2003, his full-length play won First Place in the Kumu Kahua Hawai’i Prize contest and his holiday story “Christmas Stories” has been serialized on Hawai’i Public Radio. He lives in Honolulu, Hawaii with his wife, the biologist Marguerite Butler, his daughter, the poet and actor Raine Higa, and their good dog, Tim Tam.