Tag: Young Authors
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‘Love of my Life’, Second Place in Fiction
Love of my Life by Romola Cavet BRANDY My mother called me the love of her life. We used to sit together on sticky white plastic chairs on the sun-cracked concrete outside our trailer, me staring at her staring at everything. “Brandy, it’s just you and me against the world,” she would promise. The lines in…
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Chapter from ‘The Boy with the Red Bicycle A Novel’, Third Place in Fiction
Chapter from The Boy with the Red Bicycle A Novel by Ashley Theilacker The air was hot and stale, stumbling and tangling against the trees outside the window. Alf felt his body numbing in the July heat, a pleasant sort of buzzing in his feet to match the tone of the bumblebees outside. The room…
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‘Reincarnation’, Second Place in Poetry
Reincarnation by Anjali Pajjuri there are bhajans in these wicker chairs; Kali’s warnings etched in persimmon. turmeric and half-dried yoghurt massages, coconut oil, sandalwood soap bars: all yield alabaster//virginal thought. strawberry milk cools my cupped palms as camphor winds carry mustard seeds and colonialism. emerald moon, a…
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‘Life Raft/Casket’, Third Place in Poetry
Life Raft/Casket by Angela Wei The first time I saw my mother cry she was a life raft slash casket, running her hands through her graying hair, counting out the ashes of my father’s cigarette. She cries like me, all snot, sniffling, all tissues and wet snow, with tears carving ski-tracks down her face. …
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Congratulations to the winners of the 2020-2021 Young Authors Writing Competition!
We are excited to announce the three winners in each category—creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry—of the 2020-2021 Young Authors Writing Competition, hosted by the English and Creative Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago! Our judges selected the winning pieces from over 2,400 stories, poems, and essays that we received from around the country and all…
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Top Ten 2020-2021 Young Authors Writing Competition!
We are delighted to announce the ten finalists in each category—creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry—of the 2020-2021 Young Authors Writing Competition! Our judges had a huge challenge to choose the finalists from hundreds of extraordinary pieces we received from all over the world – over 2,400 poems, stories, and essays in total. Congratulations to all…
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‘Under the Same Sun’, First Place in Nonfiction
Under the Same Sun by Hannah Ahdab I. The power outages happened every day at noon. These outages were as integral to the Syrian lifestyle as afternoon naps and eating dinner at 10 p.m. It was seemingly cruel to cut the power during the hottest part of the day, as if being in the desert wasn’t torture enough.…
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‘Turmeric Stains’, Second Place in Nonfiction
Turmeric Stains by Priyanka Shrestha I remember sitting on my bathroom counter the summer before seventh grade in a thin tank top and shorts. I was wearing my newly prescribed glasses and staring at every stretch and etch on my skin. I recalled my mom’s words, that I usually either ignored or reluctantly, with dramatic shows…
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‘One Child’, Second Place in Fiction
One Child by Hannah Han They took you on a Thursday. The family planning officials pulled up to our house in a sun-white truck in the late afternoon. They wore heavy boots, flecked with mud, and strained faces, the skin pulled tight around their skulls like raw leather. Everything moved slower that summer. The nights flooded…
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‘New Year’, Third Place in Fiction
New Year by Alexis Yang For most of my life, I believed that my daddy was the luckiest man on Earth. I wasn’t entirely sure what luck exactly was or what constituted it, but my daddy had it. He always wore crisp white shirts, plain but freshly ironed. When I was little, he’d swing…