The Vacationers | Maria Caruso

Maria Caruso has won the 15th New Millennium Nonfiction Prize for “The Vacationers.” She will receive $1,000 and publication both online and in print. A Note from the Author: “I’ve shifted Eleanor Roosevelt’s idea about life, ‘The thing you think cannot do is the thing you must do,’ and applied it to my writing. I try […]

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Why I Work | Jeff Walt

Poetry Writing Contest XIII, First Place (2002)
I find poetry under every rock, in all the nooks and crannies of life- search for the dark and light of who we are, in what we assume to be terrestrial and mundane. When I feel at a loss for subject matter I simply look to the moment: where I am and what I am doing always has a poem in it. — Jeff Walt

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Requiem for a Dream | Laura S. Distelheim

Poetry Writing Contest XIII (2002)
First Place

Soon after the incident conveyed in “Requiem” occurred, I realized that, in coming to know this man and in witnessing the injustice done to him, I had been privy to both the heroism and the evil which lie, often unsuspected, beneath the surface of ordinary lives. My hope in writing this piece was to draw both of them into the light. — Laura S. Distelheim

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For A Boy In A Bus Depot | Eduardo Corral

Poetry Writing Contest XII (2001)
First Place

Sometime ago my father bit into an apple then placed it on a window sill. For a moment it seemed a moth had settled on the apple. I remember picking up the apple and its weight brought back a memory of walking hand in hand with my father through a bus station. I knew I had the raw materials for a poem. But for a long time the poem wouldn’t surface through the blankness of the page. Over and over I kept focusing on the importance of my presence within the poem. I had to return to that moment when my imagination had altered a bite mark into a moth. I began to write from inside that moment. The poem surfaced. I was thankful but humbled by the poem’s simple lesson: Sometimes the imagination exposes you to a new world but leaves you at its doorstep. — Eduardo Corral

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Tilos | Trent Moorman

Nonfiction Writing Contest XII (2001)
First Place

Don’t write about something interesting, write about something odd, like nose hair, or the guy who tried to pogo-stick across Czechoslovakia while playing ‘Freebird’ on a viola the whole time. No other songs, just ‘Freebird’.. — Trent Moorman

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