Top, from left: Mialise Carney, Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, and Sharon K. McClain. Bottom, from left: Alejandro Perea-Sanchez, Jacob Reina, and Kaylee Ruiz.
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 2023 award recipients.
Fresno Creative Nonfiction Prize (graduate)
Judge: Brenna Womer, author of the nonfiction book Unbrained
Winner: Mialise Carney, for the essay “On Muteness”
Judge’s remarks: “When the tide is low on a rocky shore, puddles of water remain in the pocked surfaces of the rocks, water warm as a body and teeming with life. Reading Mialise Carney’s ‘On Muteness,’ an essay in vignettes and interludes, is like moving from one puddle to the next and getting as close to each surface as possible to observe the microcosm. Carney’s carefully selected details, vivid descriptions, and unexpected yet economic use of language make for a rich and compelling reading experience that left me satisfied but greedy for more.”
Honorable mention: James T. Morrison, for the essay “Thirty Magic Tricks”
Prize supported by: Friends of the Creative Writing Program
Fresno Creative Nonfiction Prize (undergraduate)
Judge: Brenna Womer, author of the nonfiction book Unbrained
Winner: Sharon K. McClain, for the essay “Escape Artist”
Judge’s remarks: “Achingly honest lines and a keen eye for detail bring Sharon McClain’s ‘Escape Artist’ to life on the page. The author lets us feel along with her younger self ‘the familiar tangle of homesickness, anger and loss’ as she navigates a particularly complicated relationship with her mother, who visits only once during her more than three months in a psychiatric facility—‘I tried to hate her,’ McClain writes, before admitting, ‘I cried when she left.’ I’m amazed by how much description the writer captures in just five pages.”
Prize supported by: Friends of the Creative Writing Program
Fresno Fiction Prize (graduate)
Judge: Dionne Irving, author of the story collection The Islands
Winner: Mialise Carney, for the story “[ Go Live ]”
Judge’s remarks: “The troubling world in Mialise Carney’s ‘[ Go Live ]’ considers the distance and the intimacy that technology and social media offer, how the internet has created new forms of exploitative capitalism, all while acting as a remarkable critique of choices it forces an individual to make. Carney’s haunting language draws the reader into a story that asks us to consider how we passively exist in a world with such pain. This story of streamers and cam girls and pay-for-violence on demand might feel dystopian if it wasn’t such an honest and true depiction of the ways technology has worked to connect us even as it continues a cycle of degradation of the weakest among us.”
Prize supported by: Friends of the Creative Writing Program
Fresno Fiction Prize (undergraduate)
Judge: Dionne Irving, author of the story collection The Islands
Winner: Jacob Reina, for the story “Waiting for Alyona”
Judge’s remarks: “Jacob Reina’s ‘Waiting for Alyona’ is a dreamy story that feels kind of like a song, at once familiar and haunting. The language of the piece washes over the reader as they are trapped in the recursive nature of memory. Reina’s characters move through continents and time against a larger backdrop of political turmoil. The story’s lyricism and poetic qualities ask us to consider the nature of love and loss.”
Prize supported by: Friends of the Creative Writing Program
Mireyda Barraza Martinez Prize for Social Justice Writing (graduate)
Judge: J.J. Hernandez
Winner: Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, for the poems “Ink, Two Versions of the World,” “No More Years. Of Violence,” and “Unidentified”
Judge’s remarks: “Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras’s work is visceral and voice and audacity. She uses the page as a place to sing, punctuate, and contemplate the liminal by pushing a duality of past and present home, as well as the power of the brown female and metaphorical, parasitic-white machine/man of her nightmares.”
Prize supported by: Friends and family of Mireyda Barraza Martinez
Mireyda Barraza Martinez Prize for Social Justice Writing (undergraduate)
Judge: J.J. Hernandez
Winner: Alejandro Perea-Sanchez, for the poems “Part-Time Slog,” “Don’t you know I have to work in the morning?” and “Here’s to the Sandwich I Made at 2 AM”
Judge’s remarks: “Alejandro Perea-Sanchez’s poems ride a tone as they push the disparities of retail work in a humorous and taunting honesty. I always admire work that can make me laugh and feel at the same time. The work here presses and prods, not allowing pity by existing in the indicative.”
Prize supported by: Friends and family of Mireyda Barraza Martinez
Soul Vang Prize for Poetry
Judge: Burlee Vang, author of the poetry chapbook The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth
Winner: Kaylee Ruiz, for the poem “asian american pacific islander”
Judge’s remarks: “Kaylee Ruiz’s voice moves skillfully inward and outward, connecting history to the present moment, gathering our Asian American community into songs of protest and healing. This is our pain distilled into unapologetic lyricism so fierce and precise, it sharpens our collective defiance against silence and reminds the oppressor of what he’s taken from us.”
Prize supported by: Soul Vang and May Yang-Vang, through an endowment with the Fresno State Foundation
Ernesto Trejo Poetry Prize (graduate)
Judge: Maya Pindyck, author of the poetry collection Impossible Belonging, and winner of the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Winner: Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, for the poem “The Exit”
Judge’s remarks: “In this haunting poem by Hermelinda Hernandez Monjaras, death becomes a fusion of bodies, an exchange of symbols, an archetypal tongue rooted in a love that the speaker both refuses and devours. This clear-eyed poem embraces the unknown, gives it form: ‘my final goodbye. She says the exit / to life is through the body. I say / the body remembers twelve knots.’ Driven by a voice that speaks straight to and through its subject, ‘The Exit’ offers a vision for what to do with—and how we might newly make—a language of symbols.”
Honorable mention: Alberto Saldaña Uribe, for the poem “los muertos no hablan pero los mirones son de palo.”
Prize supported by: Friends of Ernesto Trejo, through an endowment with the Academy of American Poets
Larry Levis Poetry Prize (undergraduate)
Judge: Maya Pindyck, author of the poetry collection Impossible Belonging, and winner of the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Winner: Sharon K. McClain, for the poem “Weathering”
Judge’s remarks: “Sharon McClain’s ‘Weathering’ gives light and language to what can’t be said and, in this way, illuminates a familiar search for words, asking aching hypotheticals through sharp, intuitive metaphors. McClain’s is a lucid voice laid bare—an attempt to speak to a loss impossible to bear. ‘What if the sky, Rorschached, unravels.’ Throughout the poem, the speaker’s suffering interior becomes a cinematic landscape encapsulating its reader. This beautiful, lyrical poem punctures the heart.”
Honorable mention: Celeste Jones, for the poem “What Love and Fear Mean to a Queer Kid”
Prize supported by: Friends of Larry Levis, through an endowment with the Academy of American Poets
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