The Fresno State Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing each spring awards its annual Creative Writing Prizes, supported by the Academy of American Poets, the Department of English, and community donors. Each prize is $100. Here are the 2022 award recipients.
Fresno Creative Nonfiction Prize (graduate)
Judge: Charles L. Radke, author of the memoir Stuccoville: Life Without a Net
Winner: Rosie Bates, for the essay “Fear”
Judge’s remarks: “Rosie Bates’s ‘Fear’ is a mature, fully developed essay that takes its readers to a perilous place: in Yosemite, clinging to a rock face one-thousand feet above the Valley floor. Thanks to the author’s masterful use of tension — both the literary and literal — readers are forced into a welcome discomfort as the author navigates the nuances of a dangerous and mysterious pitch, a life on the edge that connects us to her troubled past and brings us face-to-face with her uncertain present. Like the climb itself, something in Bates’s life ‘didn’t feel right,’ and the reader feels that shifting foundation right along with her. Ultimately, Bates concludes that climbing — her metaphor for writing and living — forces us into our fears and ultimately demands that we trust our instincts. Bravo!”
Honorable mention: Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, for the essay “x”
Prize supported by: Jackie and David Everwine
Fresno Creative Nonfiction Prize (undergraduate)
Judge: Charles L. Radke, author of the memoir Stuccoville: Life Without a Net
Winner: James Morrison, for the essay “Five East”
Judge’s remarks: “James Morrison’s ‘Five East’ is a brutally honest, peel-the-flesh-back kind of essay that exposes the grim, gritty, and sometimes tender sides of addiction and recovery. I loved this piece for so many reasons, but the primary one is that it pulled back the veil on a setting with which I am not intimately familiar. I love to see new worlds and have new experiences, and ‘Five East’ provided entry to such a place, one replete with trajectory, tension, and flawed but developed characters — all key elements to a strong narrative for me. I also found many descriptions jaw-droppingly exquisite, like this one from the inside of a rehab hospital: ‘sunlight vaguely streaming in pins through lingering smoke.’ Best yet, though, I found myself really rooting for Morrison, and I think this piece is just the beginning of what has the potential to be a riveting gut-punch of a memoir, a la Mary Karr’s Lit.”
Honorable mention: Sharon K. McClain, for the essay “Teresa”
Prize supported by: Jackie and David Everwine
Fresno Fiction Prize (graduate)
Judge: David Borofka, author of the story collection A Longing for Impossible Things
Winner: Mialise Carney, for the story “The Rage Room”
Judge’s remarks: “In this ambitious story — with its oblique allusions to ‘The Lottery’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ — Mialise Carney creates a cultural context (only a few degrees off-center from our own) in which men are invited to express their angers therapeutically; meanwhile, women can only observe the before and after-effects of such ‘treatment’ upon their male counterparts. Carney’s narrator, who cleans the messes made by such privileged men, dares to offer her own angers, and suffers consequences that are as inevitable as they are profound.”
Prize supported by: Jackie and David Everwine
Fresno Fiction Prize (undergraduate)
Judge: David Borofka, author of the story collection A Longing for Impossible Things
Winner: Emily Weissenborn for the story “Pizza Party in the Pit of the Pathetic”
Judge’s remarks: “In ‘Pizza Party in the Pit of the Pathetic,’ Emily Weissenborn’s characters take their first steps into the reality of adulthood: from drunkenness to sobriety, from dreamy aspiration to actual work, from the safety of unrequited longing to the complexities of love.”
Prize supported by: Jackie and David Everwine
Mireyda Barraza Martinez Prize for Social Justice Writing (graduate)
Judge: Marisol Baca, author of the poetry collection Tremor
Winner: Delaney R. Whitebird Olmo for the poem “A basket reaches inward”
Judge’s remarks: “Delaney R. Olmo’s ‘A basket reaches inward’ is a poem that I’m glad was written. It plays with form, language, and ancestry, and the poem is a moment that reveals itself many times over. Each time I read the lines, I came across a new and startling thing; it felt like I was returning to gather something new. Olmo is mastering poetic language and is an important poetic voice.”
Prize supported by: Friends and family of Mireyda Barraza Martinez
Mireyda Barraza Martinez Prize for Social Justice Writing (undergraduate)
Judge: Marisol Baca, author of the poetry collection Tremor
Winner: Phoua Lee, for the poem “Dark Landing Signals”
Judge’s remarks: “Phoua Lee’s poems are beautifully crafted, with lines and sections that blew me away. The images present were closely tethered and stayed with me. Lines like these show great dexterity: ‘If the moon blazes / then our bones are meant for thunder.’ Lee shows much promise as a poet who doesn’t stand back from difficult and painful subjects, and who uses language to express experience. To me, this is what social justice in poetry looks and feels like.”
Prize supported by: Friends and family of Mireyda Barraza Martinez
Soul Vang Prize for Poetry
Judge: May Yang, author of the poetry collection To Whitey and the Crackerjack
Winner: Phoua Lee, for the poem “in which orpheus is a confused hmong daughter.”
Judge’s remarks: “Phoua Lee’s poem takes us back to the realm where only dreams know what grief could desire. I refused every line believing I did not belong within it, though I’d been here before. Lee gives shape to the liminalities many of us have journeyed in the face of losing. Her adaptation of Orpheus not only moves us beyond the Greek tragedy, but refuses to let us believe Hmong cosmology is only myth — allowing us to remember the afterlife as a place of knowing, facing and becoming.”
Prize supported by: Soul Vang and May Yang-Vang, through an endowment with the Fresno State Foundation
Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize (graduate)
Judge: E.C. Belli, author of the poetry collection A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, and winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Winner: Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, for the poem “The Bleeding Love of a Water-Ghost”
Judge’s remarks: “Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras’s cascading poems are masterful arrangements that call our undivided attention to the choice of linguistic material. In many cases, a single word does the work of a whole line, prompting the reader to reconsider their understanding of this or that lexical item, as is often the case with concrete poetry, thus placing the social agreement that is language front and center. These poems have a soul of consequence. They feel known and all-knowing, and yet, they establish their own tradition: they are lyrical but raw, original, wounded and wounding, reflective and philosophical. Hernandez Monjaras’s work is a stunning gift to our literary tapestry.”
Honorable mention: Delaney R. Whitebird Olmo, for the poem “Summon the Forbidden Ceremony”
Prize supported by: Friends of Ernesto Trejo, through an endowment with the Academy of American Poets
Larry Levis Poetry Prize (undergraduate)
Judge: E.C. Belli, author of the poetry collection A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, and winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Winner: Phoua Lee, “Scavenger Hunt Where We See Our Ghosts and Run Toward Them”
Judge’s remarks: “Phoua Lee’s stunning, raw feat of a poem steps out into the night leaving the reader agape and longing. The emotional awareness and attunement of this work paired with the verbal prowess that has wrought its lines reveal a writer whose work will inhabit our common literary consciousness for a long time. Lee finds ways of saying and seeing that are at once familiar and yet unpredictable, holding horror and beauty, tradition and rupture, family and personhood in astounding tension through a remarkable mastery of the line.”
Honorable mention: Michelle Ferrer Alvarez, for the poem “Midnight: Isabel spoke in her heart, and only her lips moved. Her voice was not heard at all.”
Prize supported by: Friends of Larry Levis, through an endowment with the Academy of American Poets
We Grow Writers 