Barthelme Prize for Short Prose

Congratulations to the winner and honorable mentions for the 2024 Barthelme Prize, judged by Lucy Ives!

2024 Winner:
“Essay of Everything” by Allison Blevins

Honorable Mentions:
“Snow” by Mary Elizabeth Dubois
"Halcyon" by Danielle Shi

Lucy Ives, on the winner:
“Essay of Everything” is just what it sounds like: a trying-on of a series of sites, masks, scenes designed to invite a desired presence to approach, lured, as it were, by beauty. Maybe that presence is meaning, maybe it’s justice. What’s hardest to prove is that there is another possible guest in this world, other than desire itself. (Desire is so infernally convincing that way!) If there is such a guest, then it’s an echo. We’re left with the brilliant realization that an echo is both inadequate and fitting. It’s what comes when your own voice is the clearest thing for miles around.

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of Where Will We Live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and five chapbooks. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize from Raleigh Review, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

Thanks to everyone who submitted to the 2024 Barthelme Prize! The winner will appear in the print edition of Gulf Coast 37.2, available Spring 2025.

Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931–July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Lucy Ives

Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World; Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World; and Life Is Everywhere. She is the 2023–25 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University. In fall 2024, Graywolf will publish her first essay collection, An Image of My Name Enters America.