We could not be more excited to tell the world — that’s you — that Blake Kimzey is the winner of the Spring 2013 Black River Chapbook Competition, for his fiction manuscript Families Among Us.
Families Among Us will be published by Black Lawrence Press in fall 2014. We’re beyond happy to welcome Blake to the BLP family.
Blake Kimzey is a student in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, where he teaches creative writing. He is the recipient of a generous 2013 Emerging Writer Grant from The Elizabeth George Foundation. His work has been broadcast on NPR and appears in FiveChapters, Puerto del Sol, The Los Angeles Review, Short Fiction, Mid-American Review, The Lifted Brow, PANK, Juked, Keyhole, Monkeybicycle, and Surreal South ’13 (anthology), among others. Blake is also the author of the chapbook Up and Away, published by Rust Belt Bindery in 2012. He is currently working on a comedic novel and recently completed his short story collection, “Talking Past the Close.” Blake grew up in rural Texas and now lives in Orange County with his wife and daughter. Visit him online at www.blakekimzey.com and @blakekimzey.
Our finalists and semi-finalists were:
these tornadoes by Ruth Baumann (poetry)
A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us by Caleb Curtiss (poetry)
The Mothercake Cycle by Kolby Harvey (poetry)
Families Among Us by Blake Kimzey (fiction)
How to Build a Radio-belly by Tony Mancus (poetry)
Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush by Kerry-Lee Powell (fiction)
The Owl that Carries Us Away by Doug Ramspeck (fiction)
The Legend of Steve Prefontaine by Todd Seabrook (poetry)
SEMI-FINALISTS
New City by Scott Abels (poetry)
Sometimes, But Not All the Time by Erin Bertram (poetry)
Swim Up Safe by Emily Brandt (poetry)
White Twilight Object by Caroline Cabrera (poetry)
Alter State by Adam Crittenden (poetry)
Swallow Down by Sherrie Flick (fiction)
In the Alabaster City by Douglas Jones (poetry)
Anaphora by Joddy Murray (poetry)
Rossum’s Universal Robots by Jay Orff (fiction)
All the Badness by Davina Owombre (fiction)
The Smallest Space We Both Can Take by Justin Runge (poetry)