We are pleased to announce Miracles Come on Mondays by Penelope Cray was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose and will be published next year. Kazim Ali praised this book, saying, “These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. They are philosophical, funny, and frank. Like the fictions of Fanny Howe, Italo Calvino, and Rikki Ducornet, these stories rarely comfort. Then again, as one narrator observes, ‘When some alien sensation rises in the body, it unsettles rather than clarifies.'”
We also would like to commend the other finalists and semi-finalists, whose manuscripts in our opinion were all outstanding and publishable.
Finalists: Farah Ali, Noelle Catharine Allen, Polly Buckingham, Bruce Ducker, Carrie Grinstead, Jessica Hollander, Elizabeth A. I. Powell, Greg Tebbano, Spring Ulmer
Semifinalists: Bim Angst, Lois Baer Barr, Rita Ciresi, Re-Lynn Hanson, Miah Jeffra, Jeff P. Jones, Judy Juanita, Donald Levering, Clancy McGilligan, Jennifer Quartararo, Erin Slaughter, Rob Magnuson Smith, Marion Steel, Aaron Tillman, Kami Westhoff, Kate Wisel
Penelope Cray was born in Australia and was naturalized as a US citizen on September 11, 2018. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in journals such as Harvard Review, New England Review, Bartleby Snopes, elimae, Pleiades, and American Letters & Commentary and in the anthology Please Do Not Remove (2014). She holds an MFA from The New School and has been a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives with her family in northern Vermont, where she runs an editorial business.