1st Place
“Dream State” by Mark Jacobs

Human beings commemorate. That’s why, in the future, the date could be important. The date, I mean, on which the state was founded. January 23. On a bitterly cold day, I will add, in the American city of ♘.….” (To be published in Eckleburg No. 20)

2nd Place
“Empty Spaces” by Stephanie Frazee

To be published in Eckleburg No. 20

3rd Place
“Mothers” by Carmen Machado

To be published in Eckleburg No. 20

2014 Franz Kafka Award Finalists

Amy Narneeloop

Gertrude Stein 2015 Contest Judges

Weston Cutter is from Minnesota. His work has been published in Ploughshares and The Rumpus. He is the author of You’d Be a Stranger, Too and All Black Everything. He’s an assistant professor at the University of St Francis and runs the book review website Corduroy Books.

Mary Krienke grew up in the Midwest and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Fiction Program and has been previously published by Midwestern Gothic, Two Hawks Quarterly, Joyland, and Underground Voices, with work forthcoming in Palooka. Now an associate literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, she is currently writing her first novel.

Mary Stein lives in Minneapolis where she’s the assistant editor of Conduit literary magazine and works as a teaching artist. Her fiction has appeared in Caketrain, The Brooklyn Rail, and Spartan Lit. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for New Stories from the Midwest.

Natanya Ann Pulley is half-Navajo (Kiiyaa’aanii and Tachiinii clans). She has a PhD in Fiction Writing from the University of Utah and is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Dakota. A writer of primarily fiction and non-fiction with outbreaks in poetry, Natanya’s publications include Western Humanities Review, The Florida Review, Drunken Boat, and McSweeney’s Open Letters (among others).