_______________________________________________________________ Thank you to our final judges: Jane Gentry in poetry, Karen Salyer McElmurray in nonfiction and Silas House in fiction. **A celebratory reading will take place Saturday, January 12, at The Bard’s Town in Louisville. Click here for details.** _______________________________________________________________ JAMES BAKER HALL MEMORIAL PRIZE IN POETRY Studies in Extinction By AMY TUDOR HONORABLE [...]

By KERRI DIEFFENWIERTH It’s a date, or rather, three’s a crowd. My sister’s boyfriend, Cary Boy, will swing by our place Saturday morning at seven for a cruise on his airboat. It’s my job to make ham sandwiches and “stay the hell out of the way,” my sister Katy’s mantra ladled with the rich venom [...]

By ELIZABETH GLASS He watched me with a fierce, toxic look full of the wickedness that only members of the Westboro Baptist Church should be capable of. All I was doing was sitting with my date—a woman I hoped would become my girlfriend—in an empty movie theater. We were holding hands, and there he sat, [...]

By CHRIS HELVEY Stairs, smooth and dark and glowingly polished over decades by human palms, curled above him into the darkness of the upper floors. The old man paused for a moment and caressed the railing with the palm of his left hand. He kept the horsehead cane in his right one, resting his weight [...]

(A Novel Excerpt) By DALE NEAL Of all the things Ruth Wilder prided herself on in her largely blessed life, family was of course high on her list, ranking only a little below her perfect Sunday school attendance for the past 44 years. So on the rare Sundays when they visited Beaverdam Baptist, Royce and [...]

By ELIZABETH GLASS Every night when I was 10, the Illuanda Indians got me out of my bed and took me across the street to the Reed’s yard, which was five acres in the middle of our neighborhood. I was their new leader, an old soul, born anew in 1967, and it was 1977 when [...]

By CHAD GILPIN Verily, I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea: it shall be done.                                                 [...]

In memory of the children lost at Sandy Hook Elementary and in Syrian war zones, and of all children ever lost anywhere.

December 17, 2012

I cracked my children’s bedroom doors,
looked upon them as they napped,
upon two children vulnerable
to anything they had mistrusted,
which could be anything.

Surely sleeping innocents do not belong
in such times we call these times.

By DAVID COOPER My father, mother, and I traveled six hundred miles and twenty years back in a brand new Plymouth sedan. We traveled from Brown* Back to Plessy** in sixteen hours of straight driving except for stops in small-town filling stations Mount Sterling, Olive Hill, Ashland Charleston, White Sulfur Springs On old U.S. 60 [...]

By JANE OTTO When night glows with dread and morning arrives, scabbed over, when clouds belch combustion and the horizon is bruised, we summon the smell of tuber roses— wet laundry, snapping on a clothesline, the salt smell of hard work, the glow of a sunburned shoulder, tucking in to rhubarb pie, a pulsing fontanel—dangerous [...]