The results are in! CRAFT has just announced the winner selected by judge Kirstin Valdez Quade for their 2021 Short Fiction Prize. The winners will be published online in October. The next Short Fiction Prize will kick off in Spring 2022.

Winners

First Place—Willa Zhang: “Night Air”
Second Place—Leesa Fenderson: “Ugly”
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”

Longlist

Sam Asher: “Worldsick”
Stephanie Early Green: “The Meat They Feed On”
Zilla Jones: “Checkmate”
Michael Knoedler: “All You Have Is Hope”
Annie Liontas: “Revelations”
Melissa Madore: “Home Bird”
Kita Mehaffy: “The Mothers”
Ray Morrison: “Reason to Believe”
Hugh Notman: “Erosion”
Rudy Ruiz: “Mexico Beach”
Kate Ryan: “The Mighty Have Fallen”
Leah Silverman: “The Memory Of”
Bill Smoot: “Black Feathers”
Lisa Thorne: “Fling”
Clancy Tripp: “Gifted & Talented”
Victoria Windrem: “Bookmarks”
Robert Winterode: “aparicio”

Honorable Mentions

Jordi Torres Barroso: “A Little Color in It”
Lucia Bettencourt, with translation by Kim Hastings: “Chocolate Bites”
Leslie Campbell: “Motherlode”
Celeste Chen: “Tuesday, Postmortem”
Edite Cunhã: “The Truth that Is Hidden”
Sarah Gilligan: “Joanie on the Spot”
Sarah Gilmartin: “The Other Woman”
Leena Gundapaneni: “Pheromone Party”
Aleksandra Hill: “Words of Advice at the End of the World”
Will Hodginson: “Pillowtalk”
Aram Kim: “The Professor”
Diana López: “After Star Wars”
Anastasia Lugo Mendez: “Then Time”
Stephanie Mullings: “Eating Mango Whole”
Areej Quraishi: “Like the Chiffon of a Sari”
Flor Salcedo: “See, right here.”
Jasmine Sawers: “Tea with the Queen”
Roberta Silman: “Bed and Breakfast”
Pascha Sotolongo: “The Mustache”
Catherine Uroff: “You Can’t Make Me Go”
Adriana Mora Vargas: “A Pinch of Cinnamon”
Sharon Wahl: “Everything Flirts”