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.
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 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.
Congratulations to Jai Hamid Bashir, whose poem “The Apiarists,” which appears in Tampa Review 61/62, has been selected in the 2022 Orison Anthology, which focuses on spiritual writing. Bashir is an autistic poet and creative from the American West. Born to Pakistani-American artists, she is a recent graduate of Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Guernica Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, Wildness, The Cortland Review, Palette Poetry, and others.
Congratulations to Jai Hamid Bashir, whose poem “The Apiarists,” which appears in 