Waasnode Fiction Prize winner and finalists announced!

Congratulations to Ucheoma Onwutuebe, the winner of this year’s Waasnode Short Fiction Prize!

Final judge Marisa Crane on the winning story: Written with self-assurance, tenderness, and quiet charm, “Man” by Ucheoma Onwutuebe had me hooked from the first line. It is a brilliant story about desire, compromise, and what it means to simultaneously lean into and away from intimacy. The masterful use of second-person POV and the decision to leave the men unnamed helped elevate the conceit, highlighting all the ways we keep ourselves at arm’s distance from one another, from vulnerability and pain. It’s also full of witty lines and clever turns of phrase—I would gladly spend more time in the world of this story, reveling in the narrator’s astute and strange observations. It was a pleasure to have the privilege to read this story, and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

Ucheoma Onwutuebe is a Nigerian writer. Her works have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Off Assignment, Bakwa Magazine, and others. She has received residencies from Yaddo, Art Omi and The Anderson Center (this July). She is currently an MFA student at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Congrats as well to our finalists and their stories:

A Good Christian Woman by Liwen Xu
Field Methods by Lisa Wartenberg
The Best Kind of Flying by Vicki Xu
The Wedding by Kosiso Ugwueze
girl (/goōl/) by Emily Yang

Thanks to everybody who entered. Look for the winning story in Issue 44 in the spring!