News

Jay McKenzie Wins 2024 Danahy Prize

The Tampa Review editorial team is excited to announce that our guest judge, Ayana Mathis, acclaimed author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Unsettled, has selected a winner for the Danahy Prize for short fiction.

This year’s winning story is “Milk Bottle Churches” by Jay McKenzie. McKenzie’s work appears in adda, Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream, and others. She recently won the Fish Short Story Prize, was runner up in the Tom Grass Literary Award, and has won, placed, or shortlisted in competitions including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel How to Lose the Lottery will be published by Harper Fiction in March 2026.

image of Jay McKenzie

Of the winning story, Ayana Mathis says:

Heartbreaking. Lyrically and beautifully written. This writer shows a deep facility with storytelling and knows when to reveal and when to withhold. The characters were well-rendered. The story’s use of figurative language was gorgeous, and more importantly, this writer understands that such language can be used to evoke the mood of the story as a whole, not merely the sentence or clause in which it appears: “On the sepia-tinted west bank of the Ex . . .” or  “. . . a dress that looks like a week-old bruise . . .” Time is also handled incredibly well; though the story’s current action takes place years after that fateful summer, those events haunt this story. The writer cleverly shows us how much the present is beholden to the past. I can’t think of a better macro-metaphor than the titular milk bottles thrown into the sea so long ago: one still carrying its message, the other smashed on a shore thousands of miles away.

Please join us in congratulating Jay, and we hope you’ll keep us in mind when submissions open once again in the fall!

Thank you all for sending us your work.

Scott Frey wins 2023 Tampa Review Poetry Prize

Image of a man with folded arms smiling into the camera.
Poet Scott Frey

Scott Frey has won the 2023 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection, Heavy Metal Nursing. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2024 by the University of Tampa Press. 

 Scott Frey grew up in Western Pennsylvania and teaches English at Pine Meadow Academy. He learned to teach and found his first writing community at The Landmark School. He then found a wonderful writers’ community during his years teaching at The Ethel Walker School. He also served as a parent advisor for the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at Children’s Hospital, Boston. He and his wife run a non-profit charity, The Charlotte Frey Foundation, whose mission is to help children with multiple handicaps and life-threatening illnesses improve their quality of life.

Among other publications, he has work forthcoming in Passages North, december magazine, One, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Missouri Review, where he was awarded the 2023 Perkoff Prize for poetry. His prose chapbook, Night Nurses, was a winner in the 2023 Black River Chapbook Competition. He and his family live in Granby, Connecticut.

Tampa Review judges praised Frey’s collection, stating:

“Heavy Metal Nursing tells a story of love, the poet Scott Frey’s love for his firstborn daughter. It is not a sentimental love but a “heavy-metal” one, complicated by the hard facts of his daughter’s life: she was born with a severe brain injury, needed intensive care her entire life, and died at three years old. This book is the work of a poet and a parent in equal measure. These are poems of vulnerability and pain, of course, but simultaneously of parenting, caregiving, marriage, medicine, humor, tenderness, affection. Frey brings poetic technique to bear on personal trauma, narrative on desolation, love on loss.”

Frey says, “This collection is an attempt to depict the mix of sorrow and wonder we lived with our daughter during her traumatic birth and medically complex life. Even when our days felt like long tunnels, we were surprised by the care and kindness of our communities. This helped shape our responses to her absence and our responses to the ways her presence continues in a way unknowable beforehand.

Many of the poems began as a method of reaching towards the nurses, doctors, therapists, friends, and family who offered to our daughter and to us such exquisite attention and dedication.

The struggle to craft these narrative lines gave me a way to distill the chaos and emotions roiling within many of our most haunting scenes and memories. It gave me a form for placing lines of grit and despair arm-to-arm with lines of laughter and joy.”

This year the judges also announced two finalists:

Bruised Light: Collected Father by John Pijewski

Miss La La and the Cirque Fernando by Gavin Moses

The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review. Submissions are now being accepted for 2024.

Announcing the Winner of the 2023 Danahy Fiction Prize

The Tampa Review editorial team is excited to announce that our guest judge, Evan James, has selected a winner for the Danahy Prize for short fiction.

Image of a side profile drawing of Shayla Bruin, glancing towards the artist.

This year’s winning story is “Security” by Shayla Bruin. Bruin is a writer living in Chicago, Illinois. This is her first published work.

Of the winning story, our judge, Evan James, says, “’Security’ unfolds with subtle, sophisticated narrative artistry. When a couple in the suburbs opens their door to a pair of “new neighbors,” a breathtakingly swift series of dramatic reversals and ambiguous power shifts takes place, ultimately driving them to a profound sense of uncertainty about both the world and themselves. Fully realized and written with exhilarating skill and control, its final moments resonate with potent mystery–the once-familiar stripped bare and left standing in its own undeniable strangeness.”

James also selected the following finalists:

“Kentucky Unicorn” by Thomas M. Atkinson

“Brooklyn Bridge” by Grace Shuyi Liew


Please join us in congratulating Shayla, and we hope you’ll keep us in mind when submissions open once again in the fall.

Katherine Gaffney Wins 2022 Tampa Review Prize

Image of a woman holding a bag and standing in front of a large bush.
Poet Katherine Gaffney

Katherine Gaffney has won the 2022 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for her collection, Fool in a Blue House. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2023 by the University of Tampa Press.

Katherine Gaffney holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. She has won the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize among others and has attended the TinHouse Summer Writing Workshop, the SAFTA Residency, and the Sewanee Writers Conference as a scholar. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.

Tampa Review judges praised Gaffney’s collection, stating:

“When Katherine Gaffney’s speaker refers midway through her collection to what is ‘Long precedented/ in defense of choice’, she reminds us that only a few poets can truly predetermine the conditions for their own arrival. Yet, inchoosing this extraordinary year-spanning Fool in a Blue House as the winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, we were struck by Gaffney’s intense working between curation and assurance, this against the poetic life and body in its ongoing amendments of scale. Gaffney, in ranging us from medieval deconstructions of the heart, through to the near-apocalyptic radicalisation of the domestic, produces a book so exceptionally alive, wild, tense, and learned as to announce Gaffney as a pre-formed, right-here, right-now major new voice in American poetry, her speaker ‘a denounced planet’ only so denounced because the shadow of its prefigurement is about to cast wide. Fool in a Blue House is as much a collection of poems as it is a process of intimate discovery—intimacy in relation to love in all its facets and subsequent relationships. The poems wrestle with inheritances of gender and seek fissures for growth beyond that inheritance.”

“Most of these poems unfurled during a time of intense evolution in my understandings of romantic and familialrelationships,” Gaffney says. “The poems seek to reconcile the tectonic shifts involved with those kinds of relationships as we, as humans, move through time and space.”

This year the judges also announced four finalists:

Fabula by Supritha Rajan

Late Bloomers: a Documentary Film by Roman Gibbs by Chuck Sweetman

Rituals Unbound by Johnson Cheu

Somehow Holier by Joshua Jones

The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry is given annually for a previously unpublished book-length manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review. 

Submissions are now being accepted for 2023.