We are so very pleased to announce our Gertrude Stein Award Winners for 2014. It was a difficult decision, as we received so many fantastic submissions from truly talented writers. Please join us in celebrating our winners and finalists:
1st Place
“A Song Died” by Andrew McLinden
Among the many ways to describe good fiction is the tried but true “simultaneous inevitability and surprise.” It’s an added pleasure when surprise comes wrapped in a package of what could or should be expected. Grief as conflict is not a stranger to fiction; the extents, extremes, depths, and varied quiet subtleties of grief have been effectively plumbed. It may not be an exhaustible topic. But in Andrew McLinden’s “A Song Died,” to see the daily vacuum of a brother grieving for his sister carried a surprising impact, in the who, the how, as well as the pitch and tone of the telling. If not for particulars in the character’s life, the details and sensibility of his grief could have created a genderless character experience, thus the somewhat off-the-beaten-path sibling grief — siblings of different genders and not twins — finds a freshly effective intensity. (Cris Mazza, Judge Gertrude Stein Award 2014)
2nd Place
“Insecticide” by Rachel Goldman
3rd Place
“Song of the Amputee’s Mother” by Shanee Stepakoff
2014 Gertrude Stein Award Finalists
“Winterriese” by Sara Baker
“Peaches” by Sarah Gerard
“Anonymity of Faces” by Kirk Glaser
“The Birds on Peach Street” by Anabel Graff
“Rhonda Belle and the Butterfly” by Chad Halliday
“Down the Street that Lady Comes” by Robert Krantz
“Passed into the Fire of Molech” by Hunter Liguore
“People in Jail” by Linda McCullough Moore
“Waterhead” by Terry Mergenthal
“The White Envelope” by Sophie Monatte
“Another Man’s Wife” by Nicole Mullis
“The Letters of Odysseus to Kalypso” by Zana Previti
“Gods” by Vernon Pua
“Things You Can’t Forget” by Sara Taylor
“Fruit Loops” by Alice Urchin
“The Rooms We Rented” by Robert Vaughan
“Violins” by Luke Wiget
Our guest judge for the Gertrude Stein Award 2014 is the awarded author, Cris Mazza, whose hybrid memoir, Something Wrong with Her, is out now with Jaded Ibis Press. We encourage you to experience the talent and lyricism of Cris Mazza’s words. It has been an honor working with her here at Eckleburg.
SUBMIT NOW: Gertrude Stein Award 2015
Our Gertrude Stein Award 2015 will be judged by our excellent panel of judges and authors including Weston Cutter, Mary Krienke, Mary Stein and Natanya Ann Pulley. Read more about our 2015 judges below. You can read past winners in Eckleburg No. 18.
Read the winning stories in the upcoming Eckleburg No. 19. Read last year’s GS Award winning stories in Eckleburg No. 18, guest-judged by Rick Moody.
2015 Contest Judges
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |