Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize winners announced!!

Congratulations to the winner and finalists of our Ray Ventre Memorial Nonfiction Prize and a warm thanks to contest judge Natalie Lima, for sharing her time and expertise with us.

Winner: “Floating Bridge” by Stephanie Lee

Contest judge Natalie Lima on Lee’s winning essay: Through a mix of personal history and extensive research, “Floating Bridge” blew me away with its ambition and the author’s voice. In this expansive essay about “comfort women”—girls and women from countries across Asia Pacific forced into Japan’s imperial system of military rape during WWII—Lee illustrates how the effects of colonization and violence still linger today, all these years later. I was deeply impressed by how the writer weaved her life growing up as a Korean-American girl in Los Angeles with her life later on, as an adult, as she digs for the truth about these women who never got any real justice for what happened to them. Finally, I was also impressed by how consumable Lee made the research. Even though I spent most of the essay learning (about a history I never read about in school), I was transported by the crisp prose and the storytelling the entire time. I can’t wait to read more by this writer.

Honorable Mentions:

“You Eat Around the Fly” by Jenifer Park

“Promise Me You Won’t Tell” by Daniel Garcia

Finalists:

“Napoleon Solo” by Marcus Clayton

“Perchoo: Or the Music of Mourning” by Sarah Gorham

“Wolf Country” by Sarah Haak

“Tender Lunges” by Paula Harris

“you know it, or ya tú sa’e: una poética-autobioficticia, noun manifiesto, (les qre, x100pre)” by Rolando-André López

“Fig and Yield” by Shareen Murayama

“Am I A Lesbian?: A Meta-Analysis” by Clancy Tripp

The winning essays will be published in the upcoming Issue 43 of Passages North this winter. Thank you to everybody who entered.