After months of reading and reading, weeks of deliberating and discussing, we’re incredibly excited to announce the results of the 2018 Many Voices Project competitions!
Congratulations to our winners and Editors’ Choice picks! We’d also like to thank everyone who submitted. We look forward to sharing these amazing works with you all!
Poetry
Our poetry winner this year is Rebecca Durham with Half-Life of Empathy.
Rebecca A. Durham is a poet, botanist, and artist. Originally from New England, she now calls Montana home. She holds a B.A. in Biology from Colby College, a M.S. in Botany from Oregon State University, and a M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Montana. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Rebecca’s writing has appeared in Orion Magazine, Superstition Review, Pilgrimage Magazine, Riverfeet Press Anthology: Awake in the World, Mud Season Review, Meniscus, Epiphany Magazine, Pacific Review, Mantis, Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing, Poetry Northwest, and is forthcoming in Cold Mountain Review and Exposition Review. You may find more of her work at rebeccadurham.net
Prose
Our prose winner is Farah Ali with her short story collection People Want to Live.
Farah Ali is from Karachi, Pakistan. Her more recent work can be found in Copper Nickel, The Arkansas International, Kenyon Review Online and Ecotone. She received a special mention in the 2018 Pushcart Prizes for a story published in the J Journal, and was the winner of the Colorado Review’s 2016 Nelligan Prize. She also won Copper Nickel’s Editors’ Prize in Prose for the fall 2018 issue. She can be reached via www.farah-ali.com.
Editors’ Choice
This year, we have two Editors’ Choice selections, both from our prose contest. Beaudelaine Pierre’s You May Have the Suitcase Now and Elsa Valmidiano’s We Are No Longer Babaylan.
Beaudelaine Pierre (You May Have the Suitcase Now) is Haitian born and raised and now lives in Minnesota with her two children, Annie and Max. Her debut novel Testaman won First Prize in the 2002 Best Creole-Language Novel Contest sponsored by the newspaper Bon Nouvel in Port-Au-Prince. Pierre is an alum of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her most recent novel, L’enfant qui voulait devenir President is published by Les Editions Harmattan. In 2012, she co-edited with Natasa Durovicova, How to Write an Earthquake, a trilingual anthology in English, French, and Creole, that constitutes a collective response from Haitian writers across the globe to the catastrophe Haiti suffered on January 12, 2010. Pierre is currently a doctoral candidate in the Gender Women and Sexuality Studies department at the University of Minnesota.
Philippine-born and LA-raised, Elsa Valmidiano (We are No Longer Babaylan) is a writer and poet who calls Oakland home. For several years, Elsa was a women’s reproductive rights activist, and incorporates much of that former activism into her writing. Her works have appeared in various literary journals such as TAYO, make/shift, As/Us, Literature for Life, Anti-Heroin Chic, Mud Season Review, Yes Poetry, Northridge Review, Memoir Magazine, and Cosmonauts Avenue, as well as various anthologies such as Field of Mirrors, Walang Hiya, Circe’s Lament, Precipice, and forthcoming in What God Is Honored Here. Elsa is an alum of the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and Summer Literary Seminars that was hosted in Tbilisi. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College and has performed numerous readings. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. She blogs regularly at slicingtomatoes.com.
Francine Conley (What Sweetness from Salt) is a writer and performing artist. She has a chapbook, How Dumb the Stars (Parallel Press). After a good decade of performing multimedia solo shows as well as touring collective productions with a Franco-American theater troupe, Le Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte, she earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson in 2014. Since graduating her poems and reviews have been published in places like: American Literary Review, The Collagist, Green Mountains Review, Fogged Clarity, Juked, Pink Panther Magazine, The New England Review, Sky Island Journal, Tinderbox, and more. For more on her arts: 
Eva Heisler (Lexicon of Old Devotions) is a Maryland-born poet and art historian. Her poems have been widely published in journals, including BOMB, Crazyhorse, RHINO. Poetry Northwest, and Tupelo Quarterly. She has published two books of poems: Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic (Kore Press) and Drawing Water (Noctuary Press). Honors include a Fulbright grant to Iceland, the Poetry Society of America’s Emily Dickinson Award, and fellowships at the Millay Colony for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony.
Amir Hussain (Still Life) is a multidisciplinary poet and scholar, whose poems have appeared in many journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Faultline, Mizna, andWater~Stone Review. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota. He is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Emory University, where he is working on a project on comparative poetics.
Megan Leonard‘s (Book of Lullabies) poetry can be found most recently in Sharkpack Annual, Outlook Springs, Transom, and Reservoir. Her digital chapbook, where the body ends, is available through Platypus Press. Megan lives and works on New Hampshire’s seacoast.
Nathan Manley (De Horae, The Extant Fragments) is a writer and teacher living in Loveland, Colorado. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Northern Colorado, and his first chapbook, Numina Loci, was published in the spring of 2018 by Mighty Rogue Press. His poems have appeared (and are forthcoming) in literary journals both online and in print, includingThink, About Place Journal, Flint Hills Review, and others. His has also been nominated for inclusion in Best of the Net.
Bino A. Realuyo (The Rebel Sonnets) is the author of The Gods We Worship Live Next Door, which won a 2005 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, ZYZZYVA’s Resistance Issue, New Letters, Manoa: International Journal of Pacific Writing, Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Literary Review. A graduate of Harvard University, he lives in New York City and works as an adult educator and immigrant rights activist. His website: 
Susan Sonde (Evenins at the Table of an Intoxicant) is an award-winning poet and short story writer. Her debut collection: In the Longboats with Others won the Capricorn Book Award and was published by New Rivers Press. The Arsonist, her fifth collection will be released May 2019 from Main Street Rag. Grants and awards include, a National Endowment Award in poetry; grants in fiction and poetry from The Maryland State Arts Council; The Gordon Barber Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Her collection The Chalk Line was a finalist in The National Poetry Series. Individual poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The North American Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Mississippi Review, American Letters and Commentary, Bomb, New Letters, Southern Poetry Review, and many others.
JD Trejo-Maya (Desert Sands) was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, where he spent his childhood in the small neighboring rural pueblo of Tarimoró and where from he immigrated in 1988. His inspirations include Netzahualcoyotl, Humberto Ak’abal, Ray A. Young Bear, and James Welch. Published in various literary journals/sites in the UK, US, Spain, India, Australia, Argentina, and Germany. Pushcart Prize nominee in 2015 and was awarded Tercer Premio from El Centro Canario Estudios Caribeños – El Atlántico – en el Certamen Internacional de Poesía “La calle que tú me das” 2016. While in ceremony with Chololo medicine men in the Tule River Reservation he dreamt the above written prophecy…
Kari Nielsen Amlie (Koloniya) is originally from Montana and received a BA in English from Middlebury College. Before starting an MFA program at the University of Wyoming, she worked as a guide and wilderness ranger in Montana, Utah, Patagonia, and Alaska. Her work has been anthologized in Waymaking andWanderlust: A Narrative Map and appears in The Esthetic Apostle and CIRQUE.
Robert Long Foreman‘s (Deep Feeling) short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize, and his first novel, WEIRD PIG, won the Nilsen Prize for a First Novel. His first book, AMONG OTHER THINGS, an essay collection, was published in early 2017 by Pleiades Press. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Agni, Barrelhouse, Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. He lives in Kansas City.
Jessica Hollander’s (Resurrection Without Wings) previous short story collection In These Times the Home is a Tired Place won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, published by the University of North Texas Press. Her stories have appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Sonora Review, Cimarron Review, Bat City Review, Hotel Amerika, and more. She received her MFA from the University of Alabama and is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska Kearney.
Miah Jeffra (The Violence Almanac) is author of the essay collections The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic Press 2017) and The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (forthcoming Sibling Rivalry Press 2019). Awards include the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and finalist for the Prairie Schooner, Robert C Jones and St. Lawrence Book Prizes. Residencies include Ragdale and The Hub City Writers Project. Recent publications include The North American Review, Fourteen Hills Review, The Atticus Review, The Nervous Breakdown and Fifth Wednesday. Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.
Christina Quintana (CQ) (A Slip of Moon) is a New York-based writer with Cuban and Louisiana roots. She is the author of SCISSORING (Dramatists Play Service, 2019) and the chapbook of poetry, THE HEART WANTS (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poetry and prose has appeared in Saw Palm, Nimrod Journal, Foglifter, and OnCuba, among others. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Playwrights Realm, Van Lier New Voices at the Lark, and Lambda Literary, and received her MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. For more, visit 
Karin Spirn (The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God) is a writer, community college instructor and martial artist living in Oakland, California. She holds a Phd in English from the University of Michigan and has published work in Bust and Hip Mamamagazines. Her writing and illustrations can be found at 
Sonja Swift (Echo Loba) writes to explore the contours of place as land, home, language, memory and identity. Her work has appeared most recently in Barren Magazine, FIRE & RAIN: Ecopoetry of California, a publication of Scarlet Tanager Press, Catamaran Literary Reader, Virga Magazine, Kestrel: A Journal of Art and Literature, Alphabet Atlas, a chapbook of prose poems published by Deconstructed Artichoke Press, and Tarot of Transformation, a long form creative nonfiction published by True Story, a publication of Creative Nonfiction. She recently completed an MFA at California College of the Arts. Together with her husband and son, she calls home both the Bay Area, California, and the Black Hills, South Dakota.
Melanie Figg is the recipient of a 2017-2019 NEA Poetry Fellowship, as well as grants from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. With an MFA in Poetry, her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, LIT, Conduit, Colorado Review, and others. Melanie lived for many years in the Twin Cities, and taught for over a decade at The Loft Literary Center. Now, Melanie lives in the DC metro area and curates Literary Art Tours in DC galleries (a Washington Post “Editor’s Pick”). She teaches writing at The Writer’s Center, as well as in local arts and community centers, and in private consultation. As a certified professional coach, she offers writing retreats and works one-on-one with writers and other creatives.
Natanya Ann Pulley is Diné (Navajo), of Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House) and Táchii’nii (Red Running Into Water) clans. She writes fiction and non-fiction with outbreaks in collage and she has published work in numerous journals including The Collagist, Drunken Boat, The Offing, McSweeney’s, Waxwing, and As/Us. Her work has been anthologized in #NotYourPrincess: Voices of Native American Women, Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction, Women Write Resistance, and more. A former editor of Quarterly West and South Dakota Review, she is the founding editor of the Colorado College literary journal, Hairstreak Butterfly Review. Natanya is an assistant professor of English at Colorado College.
Erin Slaughter is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Elegy for the Body (Slash Pine Press, 2017) and GIRLFIRE (dancing girl press, 2018), and is editor and co-founder of literary journal The Hunger. You can find her writing in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Tishman Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University, and is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University.