Short Story Award Winners – Agency Review
WINNER – “Ahmet Usta” by Hardy Griffin
This marvelous story begins with instructions that feel more like a kind of ritual; we soon see how grief and vengeance, when held close for so long, can shape our actions until they become a way of life—or until they do us in. The acute tension of this story focuses on the day-to-day operations of a neighborhood restaurant. Through careful descriptive attention and thoughtful character work in this realm, so much more is revealed and understood about the past, with devastating consequences: long held secrets, complicated betrayals, the weight of festering guilt. I admired how the setting and the descriptions of physical work so deeply shape the characters; they feel fully realized and alive. I was also transfixed by how expertly the tension and conflict are sustained throughout the story—all the way until its breathtaking end—in a way that felt effortless, inevitable, and masterful. — Guest Judge Jennine Capó Crucet
The neighborhood where I’d grown up, where I knew the family behind every door, turned squalid in an instant, full of disease, the weight of history crushing us from above, trapped between the coastal highway and the walls of the old city. The missing manhole cover on the corner of Barn Door Road, the packs of feral dogs hunting rats at night, candy sold on the street for the holidays made from melted plastic, exploding natural-gas canisters, lead paint, earthquakes…
Contact Information: hardygriffin@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
One month after 9/11, I moved to Istanbul and ended up living there for the next fifteen years, writing about Turkey and translating short fiction from Turkish to English. I met my wife and we had two children, but we couldn’t stand how the democratic system was being turned into a fascist one, so when my wife landed a job teaching Turkish and Ottoman at Cornell University, we moved (back) to the US in the summer of 2016. Little did we know what that November would bring!
Prior to moving to Turkey, I completed an MFA at The City College of New York in 2000, but it wasn’t until I lived in and started writing about Istanbul that I began to really publish and place in contests. My writing has appeared in The Masters Review, Aesthetica Magazine, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, and others. I was a contributor to The Gotham Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury), as well as Exsolutas Press’s 2024 Thriving Anthology and Red Noise Collective’s 2023 Anthology. My translations from Turkish to English can be found in Words Without Borders, Lunch Ticket, and The Istanbul Biennial, and I am an editor for the internationally-focused journal Cable Street.
Personal website: www.hardygriffin.com
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
SECOND PLACE – “The Corpse Flowers” by Thomas Heise
Part of the brilliance of this story is how deftly it maneuvers between the narrative threads in which it traffics: stories explicitly and implicitly told. It’s a hard thing to pull off—having a character recount an epic-feeling tale to another character—and here, it’s done beautifully, and more importantly, it feels completely believable and even necessary given the story’s premise. Much like our narrator here, I came to the end of this feeling like I’d been transported to another place, “like I was returning for the first time in years from a long journey.” There’s a patience to the pacing and the prose that mesmerized me. And I’m a sucker for any story that so powerfully uses setting and the natural world—especially something like the corpse flower—to elucidate the themes of longing, displacement, and loss. — Guest Judge Jennine Capó Crucet
Then she revealed that like the corpse flower, she was from Indonesia. Yet, she had few memories of the archipelago. At seven, she had been uprooted and flown to America to live with her aunt Nisrina on Staten Island. She had never returned. The flowers, I soon gleaned, were her connection to her homeland that, as the years passed, drifted further and further away from her.
Contact Information: thomaswheise@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
My short story “The Corpse Flowers” placed second out of 2,500 entries in The Masters Review’s Summer Short Story Award for New Writers. As part of the prize, The Masters Review is sharing my information with partnered literary agencies. I’m seeking representation for my upmarket literary novel, The Dream House (63,000 words). This is my first, full-length novel; the manuscript is complete and available.
I’m the author of two books from Sarabande: Moth (2013), a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year, and Horror Vacui (2006), whose title poem won the Gulf Coast Prize. My fiction and poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Chicago Review, Santa Monica Review, The Masters Review, and elsewhere. My residencies and fellowships include MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay Arts, the American Academy in Rome (as a visiting scholar), and the Robert Frost Fellowship in Poetry at Bread Loaf. Formerly tenured at McGill University, I am now an Associate Professor of English at Penn State Abington. I live in New York City.
My own history of restless movement—northern Michigan, southern Florida, San Francisco, New York, Montreal, Toronto, and back to New York—shaped by family divorce, academic life, and my own marriage’s unraveling, informs The Dream House’s themes of displacement, haunted places, and memory’s unreliability.
The Dream House follows psychiatrist Michael as his fragile equilibrium collapses when his missing wife Ada’s suitcase reappears, containing only a single high-heeled shoe. Soon after, the discovery of her diary propels him into an obsessive search for the truth, from the decaying opulence of a Neapolitan palazzo to the disorienting glow of a New York experimental art installation. As a memory-erasing drug distorts his perceptions, Michael becomes entangled with Ada’s volatile twin Sophie; Francesca, the enigmatic keeper of Ada’s final secrets; and Akiko, his sharp-witted new girlfriend, whom he pushes away even as she tries to steady him. What begins as a search for Ada spirals into revelations about betrayal, hidden family ties, and the ways we deceive ourselves—ultimately forcing Michael to confront the person he has understood least: himself.
This novel will appeal to readers drawn to the psychological depth and unreliable narration of The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides, the grief-infused mystery of All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda, and the literary elegance of upmarket fiction exploring memory, self-deception, and fractured relationships.
I’d be delighted to send the manuscript to you for your consideration.
Personal website: thomaswheise.com
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
THIRD PLACE – “Will the Real Kim Novak Please Stand Up” by Rachel Vogel
This story is layered with unforgettable descriptions and observations; you know you’re in sharp, fearless hands when a sentence ends with the phrase “her mother, who has dark hair and a crepe for an ass.” What I admired about this story is its willingness to lurk in the gray areas: Will the protagonist relapse into her addiction? Is her father cheating on her mother again, and how far is she willing to go to find out for certain? I also admired the story’s dialogue and how much it reveals about the relationships between characters—what they’re willing to say and what they withhold. — Guest Judge Jennine Capó Crucet
Julissa has just dropped a month’s salary on a tiny diamond stud for her tragus, a reward for twenty weeks of sobriety. As she’s leaving the piercing salon, she sees her father enter a wine bar across Melrose with a woman whose blonde updo and juicy rump don’t belong to her mother, who has dark hair and a crepe for an ass.
Contact Information: pplusr@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
In law school, I represented indigent criminal defendants. The two clients I can’t forget are Sandra Surprise and LaSalle Bonds. Chubby, pink-cheeked Sandra, a fast talker with a thick Boston accent, was charged with welfare fraud. Wary-eyed LaSalle, barely out of his teens, was accused of petty theft. I don’t remember the applicable criminal codes, court rules, or outcomes (probably time served or community service) of either case, but I remember Sandra and LaSalle’s faces with striking clarity—how Sandra’s pale, buggy eyes lived up to her surname, while LaSalle’s expression managed the feat of pleading while rejecting. Their journeys—how they arrived at their present circumstances—consumed me far more than any legal work.
When I graduated, my fellow student defenders awarded me the sui generis “My-Clients-Are-My-Children” award because everyone saw that my personal attachments eclipsed my legal interests. This was not the first clue that law school had been a mistake, and after a brief legal career, I embarked on a life of child-rearing and writing, the former dominating for many years.
My fiction explores the stories people inherit and the hard work of revision, with an emphasis on women’s search for identity.
My current project is a novel-in-stories in the vein of A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, and The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro. It follows the intersecting and diverging lives of childhood friends Julissa Reuben and Daphne Stickney as they weave a double helix through adolescence, college, a love triangle, addiction and recovery, marriage, divorce, career change, and child-rearing. Julissa—volatile and insecure—begins her life journey with a damaged attachment to her mother, while Daphne—placid and contained—benefits from a more secure maternal bond. When they become mothers, their trajectories reverse. Julissa, a single parent, finds the experience deeply healing, and by the end has clawed her way from fractured to whole. Daphne, who entered motherhood as a more stable person in a traditional marriage, is gradually worn down by the role itself and must self-fracture to find peace.
In the novel’s final story, the friends reunite as sixty-year-old single women—wiser, scarred, and accepting. When Daphne enlists Julissa’s help navigating the sale of her Cape Cod summer house, brokered by the man they both once loved (now a smarmy residential realtor, a long fall from his days as a leftist political activist), the women collude with the solidarity of survivors, finding a measure of redemption. Two different starting points. Two different roads. The same essential reckoning.
At its core, the book explores the effect of the mother-child bond on a person’s capacity for intimacy and joy, and the possibility of redemption through self-awareness—the slow, costly work of becoming oneself.
The novel is about two-thirds drafted. Six of the stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Harvard Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. Among these are “Visitors,” which won ASF’s 2019 Halifax Ranch Fiction Prize judged by Rebecca Makkai, and “Will the Real Kim Novak Please Stand Up,” which The Masters Review has just published.
I have three additional projects in the pipeline:
- A historical, feminist novella about Captain Ahab’s wife, who is mentioned but once, unnamed, in the sixteenth chapter of Melville’s novel. In my story, temptation and the burdens of motherhood haunt Mrs. Ahab as she awaits news of her husband in a small New England town.
- A novel based loosely on the life of Lori Berenson, the New Yorker who served twenty years in a Peruvian prison for collaborating with a terrorist organization. The book explores her radicalization, its consequences, and the landscape of her later regret as a middle-aged mother.
- A novel narrated by the college roommate of a historical figure modeled loosely after Aung San Suu Kyi. The book juxtaposes a life of public consequence with one of private intimacy and explores ambition, envy, and the costs of each.
Personal website: authorrachelvogel.com
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
HONORABLE MENTION – “UNDELIVERANCES” by Charlie M. Case
Between now and then lies your route and your deliveries and the climb, hand over hand. You stand from the windowsill and step out into the skyways, the mail-carrier’s bells at your wrists and ankles chiming your beginning.
Contact Information: charliemcase@icloud.com
Biographical Statement:
I am a fiction writer and incidental poet from Southern California, currently based in New England. I hold a BA in English from the University of Connecticut, where I also served as Fiction Editor on the campus literary magazine, Long River Review, for its twenty-seventh volume. Prior to my tenure as Fiction Editor, my fiction and poetry both found a home in LRR, and my work has also appeared in Blue Muse Magazine, Sublunary Review, Apricity Press, Major 7th Magazine, The Masters Review, and is forthcoming in Reed Magazine. I have received multiple first-place prizes in fiction and one in poetry, of which I am most proud of my winning submission “Newton Considers the Still Life” to the 2023–2024 Jennie Hackman Memorial Prize for Short Fiction.
My writing lies in the literary and speculative realms, tending toward realism or magical realism. Thematically, I am interested in selfhood, grief, repression, and bonds for good or ill; I write characters who refuse to face their failings, worlds that deny them the opportunity to try, and emotions impossible for either to contain. As a trans author, I relish dissecting the societal norms of identity and interpersonal connection. You can expect both short and longform fiction from me, always character-driven, often strange.
Three active works in progress:
1) Novel, literary horror. Hauntings are common and dangerous pests, and a career in exorcising them lasts about five years before you either get out, or get got. A three-person team moves into three haunts in order to lure out their ghosts, and all the while fight to repress the burdens they carry, which the hauntings eagerly exploit.
Lu, a repressed trans woman mourning her twin, loses hold on her identity when the ghost of an apartment complex sees too much of itself in her. Nat, an indigenous woman adrift after the seizure of her home, can’t resist sympathizing with an abandoned campground, itself a spirit and as bereft as she is. And upon moving into the classic ideal of a haunted house, Mo, a butch woman tight-lipped about the many dead in her past, is forced to divulge: This house isn’t haunted—she is. When ensnared by the hauntings and at risk of losing worse than just their lives, the three must turn to each other for rescue, both to finish the job, and survive it.
2) Novel, speculative fiction. After a cosmic accident caused two parallel-universe small towns to overlap with each other, four children grew up with a foot in each world. Now adults, the four struggle to maintain their double lives and straining friendships with each other, all while dodging assassination attempts by the universe itself as it attempts to correct the overlap.
Falyn, Silas, Aubrey, and Imani celebrate the fifteen-year anniversary of their double lives, and toast to keeping both lives for another year. Then, in the midst of working on prep for the upcoming harvest festivals, the four are shocked by the death of a mentor, the only other person split between worlds—and when this coincides with a rapid increase in their own near-death experiences, it becomes clear they’re next. In denial, Falyn determines to never die. Imani decides if she’s going to perish in one world, she’ll choose which life to keep. Disabled by the universe in both worlds and reluctant to live in either, Silas is unable to pick a side. And Aubrey tries desperately to smooth their splintering friendship, but privately knows he’ll follow Imani, whatever choice she makes. Indifferent to the four’s turmoil, the universe is finally gaining ground, and no one is getting out with both their lives intact.
3) Weather the Circumstance [working title] is a short story collection whose works interrogate stagnancy, agency, and the simmering desire for change. The collection will consist of twelve pieces, of which, five are complete and seven are unwritten. “UNDELIVERANCES” is earmarked for this collection.
Of the five complete pieces, three are published or forthcoming and two are out for submission. They include:
- “UNDELIVERANCES,” The Masters Review.
- “Gravity is a Vertical Timeline,” Reed Magazine, forthcoming 2026. A person falls in a bottomless pit, trailing memories behind them.
- “Moon-Stain and Crawdad Eater,” Long River Review, 2022. A former farm child looks back on a series of memories before the death of their family, framed by a stain, a creek, a field, and men.
- “Denudement,” unpublished. A boulder muses on its identity and future as erosion splits it in half.
- “Memory of Bursting,” unpublished. A teenage girl, without full understanding of the act, kills her mother after being trapped in a magic bubble for sixteen years.
Personal website: cmcase.org
HONORABLE MENTION – “The Hurt I am Rendering” by Nathan Kimball
No matter how much soul I force into the gas pedal, trying to shove it through the bottom of the car and into the asphalt churn beneath, I can’t seem to outrace the ache of you. It chases me out of the shallow Missouri hills and into the great flat plains of the greater midwest. Does peace wait in Vegas? I certainly hope so.
Contact Information: kimball.nrk@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
A multimedia writer by nature and study, I have a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and Film from Western Washington University. While I like to travel, I spend most of my days and nights in Seattle, where I also grew up, because that’s where my bed is.
I am madly in love with the literary loser—the lonely, the languid, the listless, the unsympathetic. There is nothing more fun and thrilling than when a character, squirming and antonymic, reveals the very things that they keep hidden even from themselves; they paint the blank canvas at the back of their mind with all the color of the scene of their troubles. I live for those moments. I write for those moments.
Currently, I am focusing on three pieces:
Told in montage, the first short story is autofiction with a speculative twist. During an invasion by aliens who can see all of time all at once, a person unable to imagine the future meets someone who’s unable to escape the past. Similar thematically with the last, the second story, a romantic satire, is about trying to date in the middle of a riot, and trying to figure out how do we love when the fabric of the world frays? The last piece is an interactive novella combining the principles of wave function collapse (a high potential, low ordered state transforming into a low potential, highly rigid state) with the tenets of the Chinese web novel to create a new narrative through juxtaposition each time it is picked up and read.