With generous support from the Lacroute Initiative, Linfield University’s Creative Writing Program inaugurated the Lacroute Prizes in Poetry and Prose to honor the best student writing in the 2022-23 academic year.
Finalists were chosen from nearly sixty submissions by the creative writing faculty, then sent to poet and fiction writer Genevieve DeGuzman, recipient of the 2022 Oregon Literary Fellowship, for final deliberations.All finalists and winners will be published in this spring’s issue of Camas: A Journal of Art & Literature; winners each receive $500.
Winner of the Lacroute Prize in Poetry: “Stage Whisper” by Summer Eves
DeGuzman on the winning poem: “The prodigious world in “Stage Whisper” unravels like a runaway train and evokes a larger-than-life sensibility that astonished me. The speaker’s odyssey aspires to poetry’s epic proportions, not only in length but in detail—details of tender quotidian moments and brutal memories, and an anti-hero speaker filled with anger, despair, and longing.”
Finalists:
“A Prayer for Melanin” by Kalysa Dombrigues
“Earth: A Confession” by Zee Nace
“Loneliness Is a Barking Dog” by Zee Nace
“We Lay Together In The Way Only Corpses Can” by Zee Nace
“Smoke Bombs” by Sarah Reynolds
Winner of the Lacroute Prize in Prose: “Tree, Raven, Hillside, Fire” by Elana Gatien
DeGuzman on the winning essay: “I couldn’t pull away from the vivid, incantatory prose and metaphors in “Tree, Raven, Hillside, Fire.” The narrator summons lush detail from the natural world to capture the struggle of acceptance and grappling with one’s gender identity. In the vacuum of the burn scar comes life.
Runner-up: “Under the Lekumi Tree” by Colin Bellairs
DeGuzman on the runner-up: “This well-constructed, harrowing story about family stands out. The sibling adolescent relationship, told in the familiar frame of bickering and play, is rich with palpable detail that swings between ordinary and foreboding and otherworldly.”
Finalists:
“To Leave” Summer Eves
“Pesha” by Zee Nace
