Interview with Kaitlin Crockett, owner and operator of Print St. Pete

with Leslie Vega, Art Editor, and Yuly Restrepo Garcés, Editor-in-Chief 

Kaitlin Crockett is the proprietor, printmaker, and artist at Print St. Pete, a letterpress and risograph printshop in Gulfport, Florida. As a small business operating in a thriving arts scene and challenging economy, Tampa Review was eager to see what’s up with the state of printmaking in Tampa Bay.

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Kaitlin Crockett in her studio at Print St. Pete.

Leslie Vega: Could you talk about the origins of your collaboration here [with Bridget Elmer]?

Kaitlin Crockett: I co-founded Print St. Pete with Bridget Elmer, who was originally my first Book Arts instructor in college. She was the professor who introduced me to making zines and letterpress, and that this was a legitimate art form. Because I was a creative writing major, I was really into the idea of self-publishing my own chapbooks, and I was making little books on my own, but I didn’t even know that Book Arts was a thing. And so I was just kind of like, sewing them haphazardly with yarn, and I was friends with art students, and they were like, you know, you should look into this class that’s being taught. I had to get permission because I wasn’t a BFA student at FSU. Bridget was the teacher [of the Book Arts class] and she was just so great because she was classically trained. And she’s also a librarian!

And so she just really kind of got me into this. And I went off; I graduated, and I went and took a letterpress workshop in Asheville, North Carolina, which at the time was the closest place to here where you could do a community-based, open-to-anyone letterpress workshop. And so I went and got obsessed, and I came back and I got a little press and was printing here in St. Pete for a couple years, just kind of like teaching myself and making stuff for friends and local businesses. And then she [Bridget] moved to town because her husband got a job teaching art at St. Pete High. And we reconnected and both had our printing presses at our houses at the time. So originally, we got this space in 2011, or 2012, just as an affordable place to have the equipment out of our houses, where we could share resources.

And shortly after that, we started going out and doing little markets and artwalks, and we would sell our cards, but we would bring a little printing press, and do printing demos for people. And what we found was that people were super into doing it and interested in it. And they were like, “how do we do this? Do you do classes?” Bridget and I love to teach, of course. She was an educator, and I was working on my MLIS (Master of Library and Information Science) at the time, and was working at a library. So, I was super interested in sharing my passion for this with other people. And there wasn’t really another press that was open to the public at the time here in St. Pete. 

So we started doing kind of these casual “Paper and Pints Nights” is what we’ve called them. We would open up the shop and you would have local beer from Cycle Brewing and you could come and print your own little postcard, and just get a friendly intro. Graphic designers and other artists and writers came to us. And so, we started offering more intensive workshops, where people could come back and use the studio because we both had full time jobs outside of this as well. We wanted the equipment to be used instead of just sitting in here collecting dust, you know, nine to five during the week. Since then, we’ve just been going and there’s been continued interest in people coming here with the growing arts community and literary community now. It’s great! I think people are super interested in this like, really tactile art form, especially when we’re all in front of screens all day, every day.

Leslie: What’s unique for you about printmaking as a medium?

Kaitlin: I think it is kind of that tactile nature to it, like you can see the human hand in it; it doesn’t look perfect. I’m drawn to work where you see little imperfections. It’s really process based. And I’m also drawn to that, you know, really getting into the process of it and not so much just to make a product and allowing the process to shape my work. The thing with printmaking sometimes is you’re working within these really strict limitations. Like with letterpress, you are limited to literally the letters we have in the drawer. And you might be limited to a certain number of colors or size.

I find my creativity kind of sparks somehow within those limitations, because when I have endless options, I get overwhelmed. 

Leslie: Oftentimes I hear people speak on how limitations actually open doorways. Starting with a blank sheet is terrifying. 

Kaitlin: I think it’s just really versatile, because letterpress might not be the most accessible form of printmaking, but we offer other ones that are like simple relief printmaking, where you are able to just carve a stamp, and it takes 10 minutes, and you still get that excitement of seeing something that you made with your own hand.

And sometimes the print and even the little imperfections just end up making it. You know, I feel like people try to get things perfect. And they kind of stress about it. Their perfectionist tendencies come out when you’re working in these types of mediums, but then you see the little graininess on a wood type letter, and to me that’s what I end up liking about the piece the most. 

Print St. Pete

Leslie: Yeah, I found that with printmaking. I’m very much not a perfectionist, though, and it was sort of a detriment too. You have to balance that out, right.

Kaitlin: Yeah, otherwise, things are covered in ink and aren’t registered. And that was me at first!

Leslie: A broader question. From your standpoint here as a print shop in St. Pete, what’s the art scene like? How has it changed? And if you can speak to the larger Tampa Bay area, please do since we [Tampa Review] are in Tampa.

Kaitlin: The community here has been great, in St. Pete, Gulfport, in Tampa, and Sarasota; we have students or clients that will come from pretty much anywhere in south and central Florida.

People are right now, I think, really conscious of where they’re spending their money. And they’re drawn to spending it in local businesses, or, like, working with other humans, and connecting with them in that way. And so, you know, I end up getting more people that want to work with me than I can even take on, and so I’m having to send them to other places or just say, I’m sorry, I can’t take that on, because I have my other full-time job outside of this, so I have limited time. 

There’s no shortage of people that are finding out about us which is really cool. And Tampa specifically has been really welcoming to us. I think some of my favorite art shows and exhibitions have been in Tampa. We did one [an exhibition] at the Department of Contemporary Art in the Kress building that was like my favorite show ever. And we sold out of a lot of the different artists prints at that. 

And so, I think it’s just really cool. You can do so much with the power of a collective and a community. And so what I really like about this space is yes, I could probably take a few custom jobs to be able to pay my rent here every month and not open up the space to other people, but that’s not fun. I can do big projects and do huge shows and collaborative zines and things when I involve other people, so I think the community here in this area is hungry for that opportunity to kind of like get inky and work together and do something DIY. 

“We do not work the machine”

Leslie: Since you started, do you see it [Print St. Pete] growing? Do you see more and more, maybe say recent grads that want to use your equipment? 

Kaitlin: Yeah, that’s really who I love to work with, the students and recent grads who no longer have access to all the equipment. I offer internships and trade opportunities so if they want to come help me, then they can get reduced or free studio time. I have a USF intern this summer, a graphic design student who I’m super excited about, who’ll be my first official USF student intern. If it goes well, I’m hoping to take on more in the future. Because I think there’s a really unique and cool opportunity for them to learn in a community print shop space versus a more traditional graphic design firm or something like that. 

Leslie: Do you see a difference between what’s going on in St. Pete and in Tampa? I know they’re right next to each other, but from what I recognize from living here for a decade that it’s still pretty separate in people’s minds.

Kaitlin: Yeah, it is it’s separate. It’s interesting. Like I organized a zine fair in February, and there was one in Tampa the weekend before, which ended up being cool, because I had back-to-back zine fairs. But it was like, we could have worked together! We could have had one big one or like we could have, I don’t know… it seems like there is still a disconnect. That bridge really is hard for people sometimes. 

Leslie: Yeah. A literal bridge.

Kaitlin: Yeah, the literal bridge! But I do know, and I’m sure it’s the same in Tampa, the rising costs of living and the housing crisis here is pushing a lot of artists. You know, a lot of friends and collaborators have moved. So really, it’s bad. 

Leslie: For sure, yeah. So, we’re both librarians. I saw on the website, I think it was for Zine Fest, the quote, “What’s more punk rock than a public library?” I want you now to talk about libraries, pretty please. The importance of libraries and how it intersects with what you’re doing.

Kaitlin: I always loved libraries. Of course, I’ve always loved books and the printed word, and sharing stories, but I think libraries are this really amazing place because they’re open to anybody. It’s an even playing field, you don’t have to spend any money, everybody is welcome. I’m really drawn to those democratic ideas that the public library stands for. 

I’m at SPC (St. Petersburg College), and I work with the students there, but we’re a joint use library so we’re also part of the St. Pete Public Library systems. We have a collegiate program there, so we have students that are 16-17 years old; we have all the non-traditional college students that SPC serves, you know, single parents, all that stuff. And then we have our community members. There’s a children’s story time; there’s people that are working remote, and they come to use our study rooms to get out of the house. It’s just such a cool environment because it’s not just students and it’s not just a public library, which I’ve worked in. I really like that. Students are exposed to double the resources really, because they have access to all the public library stuff. And then we have our public patrons and the community that come and then there’s [a] really cool thing that the college is putting on like Jazz in the Stacks, where there’s a live jazz band playing in the library. 

And so I think libraries are this great resource that people don’t really know exist. They have this idea that we’re just books you know, and like, oh, maybe they’ve heard that now they can get ebooks online too. St. Pete library system does free museum passes to a lot of the museums in the area. And they have ukuleles you can check out, or telescopes. So I think there’s so much more that is going on, and it’s just a great place to meet other people and have little community events like the Zine Fest that I did there. I probably could have found a different location to do it, but I liked having it in the library because it brought people to a library that maybe wouldn’t have gotten there otherwise. And then they were like, oh, this is cool. Like, I would come back here, you know, when I need to get some work done. And so I think we got like, 30 or 40 new library cards that day from people that didn’t have one. 

Leslie: And it’s nice to show people DIY publishing and that it’s completely doable for everyone. And how that intersects with like, the books, the “real” publishing they see on the shelves. People seem to think it’s inaccessible. I think school fucks a lot of people up so they never return to the book. 

Kaitlin: Totally. 

Leslie: And so now with what you’re doing, maybe they can return to the book. 

Kaitlin: Totally. Yeah.

“Tell the darkness I did not die”

Yuly Restrepo: Could you expand on how you’re able to financially keep this place?

Kaitlin: It has been a labor of love. So in my early years, when I was starting it, I was just paying it out of my own pocket. And when Bridget was with me, you know, we just split everything. And now the rents and cost of everything has doubled and tripled, basically, since we started 10 years ago. 

I started a Patreon during Covid. Prior to Covid, all of the bills and expenses were covered through workshops. So I was doing three to four workshops a month, and that covered the bills. And then Covid hit, and I of course couldn’t do any workshops. But we didn’t get a break on our rent. And so I started a little Patreon and mailed out little monthly print packs. That got us through the pandemic. I’m still doing the Patreon so that gives me $300 a month towards my bills. And then I have pretty much been able to pay the rest of the expenses by doing workshops and then some custom work for—I try to really only work with other artists, local businesses, nonprofits, things like that. I don’t like to do wedding invitations, really, or like any of those types of jobs just because I have such limited time that I really want to be intentional with the work that I’m making. And then other than that, I create my own work. So selling zines, prints, posters, and things like that has been able to keep it going.

When Bridget and I started this, our mission was in line with a nonprofit. I had a friend here earlier today, and we were talking about setting up a 501(c)(3) to protect the historical equipment and maybe to run the educational side through a nonprofit because I think there is a lot of funding out there that I could tap into that would ensure the safety of the equipment.

Yuly: Do you do any grants or anything like that?

Kaitlin: No, I but I really do want to; Creative Pinellas [a Pinellas County arts organization] was really the first grant that I’ve gotten. We’ve worked a little bit with NOMAD Art Bus [a roaming arts educational bus-studio] and some of the other nonprofits in the area like Keep St. Pete Lit [a literacy outreach organization]. I’m just always intimidated by grant writing even though I shouldn’t be. But I think that’s where I should tap into my community because I know that there’s other people out there that can do that for me and with me.

Leslie: The Patreon thing, I mean, that’s how everyone stays afloat.

Kaitlin: Yeah. My subscribers are like my friends, you know, other artists, other owners of local businesses, which I think is just so cool. It’s really like a community-supported effort. Whenever I can, I like to give back and offer free things and do little print pop ups. 

Yuly: What do you see for the future of Print St. Pete?

Kaitlin: I really would love to focus more on collaborative publishing and publications. So doing like quarterly little zines. In the fall of 2023, I started a little meetup group called Collates. We’ve had Eckerd and USF students join us, people that have never done printmaking, and they were just interested to see what we’re up to. And so, I think there’s kind of this excitement with people and we could definitely do something, you know, tangible to put out in the community. 

I would love to do more of that as well as focus on my own work. So having this time to do the grant, I shut everything off. I didn’t do workshops for the past six weeks; I didn’t take on any client work. And I was just able to make my own work, which hadn’t happened in like years and years. I really want to make sure that I’m still able to dedicate some time to that and try to put out like a publication or two of my own every year. 

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.

In Memory of Troy Bernardo

Portrait image of a man smiling into the camera.

The Tampa Review editorial team was saddened to hear of the passing of Troy Bernardo, a recent Tampa Review contributor. Troy’s obituary can be found here. We wanted to express our heartfelt condolences and share Troy Bernardo’s nonfiction piece, “Raw,” published in Tampa Review 63/64.

Raw

Troy Bernardo

When you first start eating raw oysters, you can’t taste any difference between them. The Penn Cove Selects, Belons, Olys, Kumos, they all taste the same to newcomers and casual eaters. People say it’s like learning to taste wine, in the fact that you need to learn the subtle nuances over years through hard, dedicated drinking. But I’ve been drinking wine since I was sixteen and I still can’t tell the difference between a Cab from a cardboard box and a twenty-five-dollar glass of Malbec from The Golden Steer. Oysters though? They make sense to me. Some are briny, others are kind of crunchy, some are the color of pennies, and sometimes they’re clean and crisp.

Ordering them is like a low-stakes Russian Roulette. Every so often, I’ll get half a dozen, and it’s like eating straight out of a chum bucket. Other times though, when I’m at the beach on a sunny afternoon, drinking a beer, and dressing one up with horseradish and cocktail sauce, before I slurp it out of the shell, I know it’s worth the potential Hepatitis. That all changed though on New Year’s Eve, 2018.

That year my wife and I had a lot to celebrate. We had moved to San Diego, a lifetime goal for both of us, my younger brother had just gotten married days before, and I had published my first novel. We were back in my hometown of Port Orange, Florida, and spending nights at the pool halls I grew up sneaking into and relaxing with family to wrap up an exciting year. That night we were going to my favorite restaurant, Our Deck. It’s a stereotypical beach bar and grill that looks like a large shack underneath the Dunlawton Bridge. The draw for kids is you can throw your leftovers into the mouths of dozens of catfish in the intercoastal that splash over each other for scraps. As I got older, I found it morbid that we were feeding our uneaten fish sandwiches to living fish, but when I got even older than that, I realized that’s all they really eat.

To celebrate, my wife and I decided to get a few necessities for the evening. The first item on our list was to get some good champagne. We’re not fancy, so when I say, “good,” I mean not Andre. That along with a bag of BBQ Fritos (a chip the Midwest and the West Coast don’t get for some reason) and some sweet tea. But, the pièce de résistance, and what we really wanted, were my wife’s new favorite delicacy: raw oysters. She had grown fond of them out in California where I had convinced her to try some months before. Ever since that day, whenever we saw a raw bar or we were at a nice seafood restaurant, Laura would ask if we could split a dozen. I usually ate most of them, but I didn’t mind. 

By late afternoon, we had picked up most of our supplies, but we were still missing the oysters. On the way home from the liquor store we stopped at Gaff’s, the local butcher. I went in alone, knowing my wife wouldn’t appreciate the smell. Gaff’s is, what I would call, more of the blue-collar butcher in my small town. The meat is high quality and reasonably priced, but the stink of drained blood and the stench of dozens of kinds of meat can be overwhelming, especially to a city girl.

Truthfully, I felt intimidated grabbing a number and waiting there by the glass case of meats. Sure, I had bought steaks before and even some pork chops from Gaff’s but I had never bought oysters from anywhere other than a restaurant. Doing something for the first time in front of a crowd makes me feel nervous. I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing or make an ass out of myself, even when that thing is as simple as buying oysters.

“Number seventy-six,” the meat guy said.  

I walked up to the counter, the other men buying their steaks were watching me, waiting to see what I would get. They were judging me. I was sure of it. I tried to ignore them and stared at the three types of oysters they had. Living on the West Coast, I had been buying Baja and Pacific Northwest oysters, but now, I didn’t recognize any of these gulf ones. 

“I-uhhh,” I paused. My hands got sweaty, and I shifted my weight from side to side. 

The meat man became instantly impatient, crossing his arms and glaring at me. My eyes darted to the closest ones. I pointed and said, “Half dozen of the Gulf Coast Oysters, please.”  

The meat man counted them out and put them into a plastic bag. He slapped a sticker on it and said, “Refrigerate these right when you get home, ok?” He talked condescendingly to me, and it made me mad. But I deserved it. I had no idea what I was doing, “and” he emphasized, “make sure you keep the bag open so they can breathe. Got it?”

“Of course,” I said, like he was the idiot. But I knew absolutely nothing of what he was talking about.

When I got back to the car, I put the bag of oysters in between Laura and me. While inside the store, even over the strong smell of the other meats, that stench of raw fish overpowered everything. Inside the car, it was stronger, so I tried to open the windows to help. Laura immediately noticed, and picked up the bag, peering inside. 

“Can we close this?” she asked. “It smells like fish in here.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because they need to breathe,” I said, full of confidence. 

There was an awkward pause. Even though I was watching the road, I could tell Laura was staring at me. 

“Wait, but they’re dead, right?” she asked.

“I mean, I think so. Oysters live in the water. They can’t breathe air.”

Laura reached into her purse, and out of the corner of my eye I could see her frantically Googling. When I got to a stoplight I glanced over and saw what she was looking up. “Can oysters breathe air?” and “When we eat oysters are they alive?”

Laura isn’t a vegetarian. But her love for animals has become more serious as we’ve grown older. She stopped her car in the middle of the road to be with a squirrel in its dying moments after some heartless driver had struck it and kept going. She befriended a mouse in our walls, naming him Mickey, and refusing to set up traps to catch him even after he had chewed through several bags of chips. She has picked up alley cats and cooed them gently in her arms when the streets were dark and quiet after a long night of drinking. 

“Ah!” she gasped. “This website says they’re alive when you eat them!”

“I feel like after you shuck them open though, they’re probably dead.”

She kept scrolling and gasping and scrolling and gasping over and over. 

“Some websites say that they’re dead after you open them up, but other ones say they don’t know and there’s no way to prove they’re dead after you shuck them.”

After ten minutes of more dramatic gasping, I was turning down the road my parents live on. I finally got a chance to look at Laura. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were misty, and she was rattled by the fact that she may have been eating animals alive. For me, this wasn’t a big deal. I’m not a hunter, but I am an avid outdoorsman, and I do fish. While I respect animals, I understand the reality of the situation. The lamb chops in the grocery store don’t grow on trees, and unless I get meat by three in the afternoon, I feel sluggish and I can’t concentrate. 

“What do you want me to do?” I asked her, pulling into the driveway. “They won’t take the oysters back.”

“We have to do something,” she said, pleading with me. 

We sat there for a minute, both of us thinking of something to say. After a while, I got out and grabbed the champagne and the bag of oysters, before heading inside. I put it all in the fridge, where the meatman had recommended they go right away, and opened up a beer. Laura continued to search the internet, scouring for anything that would let us know when the oysters were actually, truly dead.

“Wait,” Laura said, a lightbulb going off, “what kind of oysters are they?”

“Gulf Coast Oysters,” I said, in between sips of Jai Alai. 

“Like the Gulf of Mexico?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Isn’t that where we are now?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“The Gulf of Mexico is next to Florida, isn’t it?”

“The Gulf is on the west side, hun,” I said. “We’re on the Atlantic side.”

“But the Gulf Stream goes by here.”

My parents, realizing we were home, came out into the kitchen with us. They could tell Laura was upset, but didn’t know about what.

“What are you getting at?” I asked.

“I’m saying, let’s release them.”

“How?”

“We’re going to Our Deck tonight, right? That’s on the water. Let’s take the oysters and set them free.”

It wouldn’t be the ocean per se. It was under the Daytona Beach Bridge, and it was the intercoastal where the water was murky and dirty. 

“Hun, they’ll probably die if we throw them in there,” I said.   

“Well, they’ll definitely die if we eat them.”

My parents were starting to realize what was happening, and while they weren’t making fun of Laura, they exchanged confused glances. My dad had already started laughing.

“So,” Dad said, “you’re going to throw the oysters you just bought into the water during dinner?”

“Well, we don’t have to do that,” Laura said. “Troy could still eat the oysters if he wants to.”

Laura and I hadn’t been married that long, but I knew better than to fall for this trap. 

“No, that’s ok,” I said. “You’ve kind of killed the overall experience anyways.”

Later that night, we pulled into the restaurant under the bridge. It’s just a gravel parking lot that has a short, old fishing dock next to a marina. Laura, me, my parents, and my youngest brother, all walked down the dock together. The moon was a small waning crescent, but the lights on the bridge and from across the intercoastal made the water glint with both artificial and natural light. The only sounds were catfish jumping and passing cars overhead. 

Laura reached into the bag first and picked one of the oysters out. She looked at it, examining its curves in the near dark. “Do you think they’ll really die?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, “but I really don’t know.”

Without hesitating, she cocked her arm back and threw it as far as she could into the channel. I grabbed one and did the same, and even though I asked my parents and brother if they wanted to throw one as well, they didn’t want any part of it. 

Laura threw the last one and stared out at the water until the ripples faded and only the small waves from the wind were there. I turned to my wife and she was smiling in the weak light, and she deserved to smile. She had done something that was, at least to me, very brave. That day, it was more important for her to try and do the right thing and look silly than sell out and be what everyone else expected. 

We all went to Our Deck for dinner. There were no guilt trips from Laura or teasing from my family. I did point out the irony of how we ate pounds of seafood, but that night I passed on the oysters.

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.