The Bridge Eight Fiction Prize is an annual contest for full-length fiction manuscripts, whether they be a novel, a collection of stories, or multiple novellas. The winner receives $1,000 and publication in Spring of 2021..
Congratulations to Our Winner
China Blue by Catherine Gammon
Even though we received an unfathomable amount of stellar submissions, even though we managed to shave our favorites down to five unique and talented finalists, there can be only one winner.
We fell in love with China Blue quickly and seamlessly as we let the musicality of its prose and the darkness of its characters seduce us into an effortless read. It’s an older story that feels modern. It’s rich with emotion while feeling sleek and economical with its language.
As any good book, China Blue was hard to put down.
Set in the early 1980s, China Blue follows a teenage girl who runs away from home to New York where the fog of her own memory follows her like a shadow. Other characters struggle with consequences of US wars in Central America and the mistakes of the surveillance state, as well as with alcoholism and what “truth” means to them.
We feel so fortunate to have found a diamond such as this.
As our winner, China Blue will be published in Spring of 2021, and Catherine Gammon will receive $1,000!
About Catherine Gammon
Catherine Gammon is the author of the novels Sorrow (Braddock Avenue Books, 2013) and Isabel Out of the Rain (Mercury House, 1991). Her fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and New England Review, among others, and most recently in Cincinnati Review and The Missouri Review. Catherine’s work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society, and from colonies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Djerassi, and Yaddo. From 1992 through 2000, Catherine taught on the MFA fiction faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, before leaving the literary marketplace to begin residential Zen training at San Francisco Zen Center, where she was ordained a priest in 2005. She lives again in Pittsburgh.
About Our Other Finalists
The Ingredients for Orange Soda by Eva Jurczyk
Eva Jurczyk is a writer and librarian who lives and works in Toronto. She immigrated to Canada with her family as a child. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Jezebel, The Awl and elsewhere. The Ingredients for Orange Soda is her first novel.
Odessa by Jeremy Griffin
Jeremy Griffin is the of the short fiction collections A Last Resort for Desperate People (SFAU Press) and Oceanography (Orison Books). His work has appeared in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, the Indiana Review, Shenandoah, and others. He has received support from the South Carolina Arts Commission, and he teaches at Coastal Carolina University, where he serves as faculty fiction editor of Waccamaw: a Journal of Contemporary Literature.
Ring by Michelle Lerner
Michelle Lerner received an MFA in Poetry from The New School. Her full-length poetry manuscript in the absence of roofs was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Pamet River Prize at Yes Yes Books. Her poems have been indiivually published by numerous journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Women’s Law Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Adanna, and others, as well as several anthologies including The American Voice in Poetry: the Legacy of Whitman, Williams, and Ginsberg and The Poetry of Place: North Jersey In Poetry. She’s a lpublic interest lawyer currently on disability while recovering from late stage lyme disease, living with her family in northwestern New Jersey. Ring is her first novel.
Be Everything! and More by Matthew Pitt
Matthew Pitt grew up in St. Louis, dwelled in numerous cities after college, and now lives in Ft. Worth, where he is Associate Professor of English at TCU. He is author of two collections: These Are Our Demands, a Midwest Book Award winner; and Attention Please Now, winner of the Autumn House Prize. Individual stories appear in The Southern Review, Best New American Voices, Oxford American, Epoch, Conjunctions, BOMB, and Cincinnati Review, and his work has won honors from the New York Times, Mississippi Arts Commission, Bronx Arts Council, William Faulkner Society, and Bread Loaf, Sewanee and Taos Writers’ Conferences. Matt also serves as Editor of descant, Contributing Editor for West Branch, and reader of his two daughters’ splendid stories and poems, when they let him.
