Carol Bly Short Story Contest Winners

Carol Bly (April 16, 1930 – December 21, 2007) was a teacher and an award-winning American author of short stories, essays, and nonfiction works on writing. Her work often featured Minnesota women who must identify the moral crisis that is facing their community or themselves and enact change through empathy, or opening one’s eyes to the realities of the situation.

2013 Carol Bly Short Story Contest Winner, Deborah DeNicola

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Deborah DeNicola is the winner of the 2013 Carol Bly Short Story Contest with her story “Come Alone to the Alone.”  Deborah wears several writing hats as a poet, fiction writer, memoirist, critic, essayist, editor and blogger. Her most recent publication is a full collection of poetry, Original Human, from WordTech Communications Press and her spiritual memoir The Future That Brought Her Here, from Nicholas Hays /IBIS Press, which reached #1 in Psychology and Social Sciences on Amazon.com. The memoir, concerned with medieval history, dream image work, travels to Israel, and Jungian thought, contains a sequence of  poems to heal her relationship with her deceased father. The poems won her an Individual Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

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2009 Carol Bly Short Story Contest Winner, Miriam Karmel

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Miriam Karmel of Minneapolis won the first Writers Rising Up Carol Bly short story contest with her story, “Happy Chicken.” Miriam will read her story on October 17th at the Anderson Center in Red Wing at an all day event remembering Carol Bly, A time and place for solitude: writing below the surface. The event features Carol’s writing partner Cynthia Loveland leading a seminar and friend and fellow writer Hamline Professor Patricia Kirkpatrick, who will conduct a workshop. Event details can be found at www.eventful.com and at www.writersrisingup.com. Miriam Karmel’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications including Bellevue Literary Review, Dust & Fire, Sidewalks, Passage, Jewish Women’s Literary Annual and Water~Stone Review. She is the recipient of Minnesota Monthly’s Tamarack Award for her short story, The Queen of Love. In 2007, she received the Kate Braverman Short Story Prize and the Arthur Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction. Her story, The King of Marvin Gardens appears in Milkweed Edition’s Fiction on a Stick (2008). Nora’s Story, a collection of short stories which she worked on at Ragdale, was the May 2007 selection at www.bookwise.com. She recently completed a second book of linked stories, Being Esther.

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