CRAFT has announced the winners of the 2021 Short Fiction Prize judged by Kristin Valdez Quade. The winners were published this month.

First Place—Willa Zhang: “Night Air”
Second Place—Leesa Fenderson: “Ugly: A Stream of Consciousness”
Third Place—Cyn Nooney: “Just the Thing for a Day Like This”

Finalists

María Isabel Álvarez: “Happiness and Other Found Objects”
Caro Claire Burke: “Gold Rush”
Emily Cataneo: “From the Mouths of Girls, a Leviathan”
Celeste Chen: “your body is a memory in motion”
Gina L. Grandi: “Layabout”
Kathryn Holmstrom: “From Gardens where We Feel Secure”
Robert Maynor: “Always with You”
Anna Mazhirov: “An Absolute”
Amanda McLaughlin: “Cheap Trick”
Neeru Nagarajan: “Suckling”
A.J. Rodriguez: “Lenguaje”
Leigh Claire Schmidli: “Sometimes the Going”

Congratulations to the winners and finalists. Don’t forget their Flash Fiction Contest is open to entries of stories up to a 1,000 words through October 31. The guest judge is Robert Lopez.