Fountain Award, Er, Awarded

The Fountain Award winner has now been announced: Stephanie Harrell for "Girl Reporter" (One Story). Yay!

For those of you who don’t know (hey, the Fountain is newish; this is only the third year), the Fountain Award is given each year to "a speculative short story of exceptional literary quality, chosen from work nominated by magazine and anthology editors." And the winner gets $1,000.

I loved this story a great deal; follow the link above to see some thoughts about it from me and my fellow jurors Carol Emshwiller and Jim Kelly. Being on such a lovely and brilliant jury was a fabulous experience (the other jurors were Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jeffrey Ford). Suffice to say, there were a number of wonderful stories in the running, and many of them are on the honorable mentions list, which you can also see at the link above.

There’s a short interview with Harrell and an excerpt of the story at One Story and you can see a photo of the author’s pirate eyepatch and beautiful blue hair AND hear her read the story at KQED.

I want to single out a few other stories that turned up in my Fountain reading, but which aren’t on the list mentioned above. They are well worth your time to seek out:

"Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet" by Lavie Tidhar (ChiZine)
"The Belt" by Theodora Goss (Flytrap)
"The Boy Who Was Born Wrapped in Barbed Wire" by Christopher Barzak (Endicott Studio)
"Under the Bridge" by Hannah Wolf Bowen (ChiZine)