Congratulations to the winners and runners-up of HFR’s 2024 poetry and fiction contest!
The poetry winner, selected by Diana Khoi Nguyen, is David Joez Villaverde‘s “REDACTION.” The runner-up is DeeSoul Carson’s “Confession.”
Diana Khoi Nguyen on David Joez Villaverde‘s “REDACTION”:
“It is so difficult to sustain individual momentum when a section of a longer project is excerpted, and “Redaction” shimmers in its brandished anger—standing both alone and as part of intricately linked ways of thinking, troubling, and reclaiming history. This sparse poem is full of multitudes: part diptych, mad-lib, redaction and erasure, contrapuntal. Like the image of a knot which signals the poem’s place in a larger project sequence, we see the entwined strands of fibers coiling, hidden, wrought, concealed, revealed, taut and tightened. And if the poem’s subject matter didn’t disarm me enough, its redaction-component-side enacts a forced laughter that renders reader complicit laugher and listener to the cruelties of history.”
The fiction winner, selected by Venita Blackburn, is Jody Chan’s “beginning, beginning, end.” The runner-up is Alex Connors’s “Spaceship.”
Venita Blackburn on Jody Chan’s “beginning, beginning, end”:
“The story begins with happiness that is almost extinguished but still indestructible despite the acidic world that feeling was born in. The language is dazzling, the journey slick and hypnotic. Swoon.”