2015 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction Winner
From Editor Stephanie G’Schwind’s Editors’ Page for the Fall/Winter 2015 issue of Colorado Review:
Twelve years ago, with the support of Emily Hammond and Steven Schwartz, now Colorado Review’s fiction editor, we founded the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction as a way to honor the memory of Liza Nelligan, a dear friend and Colorado State University English Department alumna. Nelligan passed away in 2003, and the Prize seeks to celebrate her life, work, and love of creative writing by awarding an honorarium and publication each year to the author of an outstanding short story. This year’s winner, featured in this issue, is Luke Dani Blue’s “Bad Things That Happen to Girls,” selected by Lauren Groff, who says of this story,
The magic in this story is subtle and slow-building and so unprepossessing that, while reading it, I understood I was holding my breath only when the story started to swim before me. Poor Birdie, poor Tricia! This story’s wisdom resides in the complicated web of emotion between mother and daughter, the gnarl of tenderness and fury and frustration and embarrassment, of primal loss and of overwhelming love. It’s a story that aches with truth and desperation, and I marvel at the way Blue ratchets up the motion, breath by breath, to the story’s logical but stunning end.
