News & Announcements

Blue Lion Days by CB Anderson is the winner of the 2022-2023 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award and is published by The Florida Review. Join us for a reading (on Zoom) with the author and a conversation with the writer Louie Cronin on Thursday, August 15th at 7:30PM (EDT).

You can sign up for the event at our eventbrite page here. And you can purchase a copy of the chapbook here.

CB Anderson’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, North American Review, Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, and others. The New Yorker included her book Home Now (2019) in “Briefly Noted,” and a fiction collection River Talk was a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2014. Awards include the 2022 Winning Writers Tom Howard fiction prize, the Crazyhorse Prize, and 2nd place in the Zoetrope: All-Story fiction competition. Anderson leads workshops around the U.S. and has taught at Boston University and the University of Tampa. She loves ocean swimming, scotch, and karaoke— generally in that order. Visit her at cbanderson.net.

Louie Cronin’s first novel, Everyone Loves You Back, published in 2016, made the ‘best of’ lists for Book Riot and Writer’s Bone, was featured in Poets and Writers “5 over 50,” and was a semifinalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her recently finished second novel, The New Dunster Review, is a tragi-comic tale about bullying, plagiarism, crazy mothers, and long-lost love. Louie is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University. For ten years, she worked as a writer and producer for Car Talk on NPR, where she was known as Louie Cronin, the Barbarian.

We are thrilled to announce that Kate Osana Simonian is our 2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award Winner! Her chapbook, The Screw, will be published and available to purchase in March 2025. 

Kate Osana Simonian is an Armenian-Australian writer, and she’s currently an assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino. Her work has been published in the Pushcart Anthology, Chicago Tribune, Iowa Review, and Best Australian Stories, and she’s received various accolades including the Nelson Algren Award, a John Steinbeck Fellowship, and a California Arts Council Emerging Writer Grant. Kate lives with her partner and two delightful cats, who are helping her to finish her first novel, Singleton. Ask her about it! Or check her out at katesimonian.com.

About The Screw, from judge Mark Polanzak:

The Screw is a super tight, dazzling novella about a young woman lured into an abusive relationship with a common monster of a boyfriend. The protagonist—a second-person “You”—seems to be following instructions from an internal authority that dictates how to succeed at failure. But this real-life horror story of insidious psychological abuse is told with stunning wit and innovation. This novella evokes Ann Beattie and Ottessa Moshfegh, but the writing has a velocity all its own.

The Screw is a page-turner for its sentences as much as its storyline. Because of the whip-smart humor and consistently fresh way this tale is spun, I felt a rare joyful discomfort while reading about the creeping control the abuser takes from our protagonist. The Screw manages to do what fiction should: submerge the reader in an experience rather than tell them about one.

 

About the judge for the 2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award, Mark Polanzak:

Mark Polanzak is the author of the hybrid work POP! (Stillhouse) and the story collection, The OK End of Funny Town (BOA Editions), which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Southern Review, The American Scholar, DIAGRAM, and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. Mark co-founded the literary magazine, draft: the journal of process, and co-produced the podcast, The Fail Safe. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA Program in Fiction, Mark teaches creative writing, literature, and podcasting at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Rhode Island.