The Bellingham Review 2015 Contest Winners

The Spring 2016 issue of The Bellingham Review features their 2015 literary contest winners.

Contest judge Bruce Beasley selected Ming Lauren Holden’s poem, “For My Aspirated,” as the recipient of the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry. Beasley said the poem “stunned me every time I reread it for its collision of mystery and absolute clarity . . . its insistent repetitions and piled-on rhetorical questions pounding against the unplumbable mysteries of loss.”

Eric Roe’s short story, “Notes From Lazarus,” earned the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. Contest judge Kristiana Kahakauwila called the story, “a lovely meditation on love, devotion, and hope . . . finely crafted and controlled but never overwrought.”

S. Paola Antonetta, contest judge for the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, described the pleasures of reading Leigh Claire Schmiddli’s work: “‘This Sonata, into the third movement’ is an essay that puns deeply to get at the deep truths of all those ways in which language, like life, evades our meanings for it. Divided, like a musical piece, into movements, ‘This Sonata’ evokes movement itself in all its forms . . . Piercingly lyric, haunting in its details.”