Winners of The Enizagam Literary Contest

The latest volume of Enizagam, a literary journal edited, designed, and published by the high school students of the School of Literary Arts at Oakland School for the Arts, features the winners of their annual Literary Awards in Poetry and Fiction.

Poetry
Winner: Kat Harville
Finalists: Laura Jo Hess, Michael Mlekoday

Fiction
Winner: Mirene Arsanios
Finalists: Alma Garcia, Mary Kuryla

Of Arsanios’s short story, Daniel Alarcon writes: “Mirene Arsanios has written a dreamy, sultry gem of a story. “B” is about love and desire and growing up; about the power dynamic between two girls on the cusp of being young women. I was drawn in by the careful, supple language, and the poetic rendering of a scene that is both mesmeric and utterly real. Bravo!”

Of Harville’s poems Eileen Myles writes: “Kat Harville #1 for me. I love the intense verbiness. It’s wild stuff full of sprung energy, shrinking and pouncing, full of animals and animalism, full of pronouncements: I am the terrible vanilla and you….It’s brave, passionate, fun dark work that is running on its own honor, its own steam and it does not let up and I am never once disappointed in this work. She plays it to the end, a real poet.”