Why I Never Get Anywhere, or, A List of Mostly Failed Poetry Ideas Scribbled at the back of Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude | Kim Farrar

57th NMW Award for Nonfiction
Kim Farrar of Astoria, New York

An honest and joy-soaked accounting, Farrar’s essay is an ode to those magical, maddening moments that make up a life, and the brilliant, unfinished poems tucked away in nearly every writer’s mind.

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Lines in Algonquin | David Sloan

55th NMW Award for Poetry.
David Sloan of Brunswick, Maine for “Lines in Algonquin”

Sloan’s “Lines in Algonquin” is a transportive meditation on primal paradoxes.
Why does experiencing Nature alone reveal one’s connection to every living thing? How can a moonless sky make us feel inconsequential yet intricately linked to every falling star? For those who could happily spend a lifetime pondering such questions, this poem is for you.

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Baptism | Ellen Pauley Goff

53rd NMW Award for Fiction.

It’s easy to forget there are places small and remote enough to have escaped the inexorable pull of “progress”… places that still bow to laws and customs all their own. Easy, too, to underestimate just how strong the clutches of those places can be.
Part ode to, part interrogation of the Southern Gothic genre, Goff’s story is here to remind us that though we may be done with the past, the past is seldom done with us.

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Bird Rearing During a Pandemic | Melanie Hoffert

52nd NMW Award for Nonfiction.
Melanie Hoffert of Battle Lake, Minnesota for “Bird Rearing During a Pandemic,”​

In times of turmoil, when threats loom both externally and all-too-internally, what good can it possibly do to rescue one tiny beating heart? As Hoffert’s essay so marvelously reminds us, sometimes our own heart gets rescued too. 

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