This year's Guest Judge is John Calvin Hughes. John Calvin Hughes has published in numerous magazines and journals, including Dead Mule, Southern Indiana Review, Autumn Sky Poetry, Feign, The Timberline Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Mississippi Review. His publications include a critical study, The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme (The Edwin Mellen Press); three poetry chapbooks, The Shape of Our Luck (Sargent Press), Cul-de-sac Agonistes (Black Bomb Books) and Talking to Yourself (Bottlecap Press); a full-length poetry collection, Music from a Farther Room (Aldrich Press); a short story chapbook, Voices Carry (Bottlecap Press), and five novels, Twilight of the Lesser Gods (CreateSpace), Killing Rush (Second Wind Publishing), The Lost Gospel of Darnell Rabren (Bowen Press Books), The Boys (Regal House), and The Green Man (Page Turner Publishing). Nominated for a Pushcart in 2015, he is also the winner of the Ilse and Hans Juergensen Poetry Contest and The Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize.

He had this to say about the winning story, “A hat made of rabbit for Marilyn Monroe”: This story does what the best writing does: show a fraught situation, in this case a daughter/father relationship, in such a way as to explore strong feelings without lapsing into sentimentality. The issues are compelling: what can we believe of what our parents tell us? And what would they do for us, how many times would they lay down their lives just for us? And when we find that they are liars, then what? The myriad ways our parents disappoint us, and our crazy expectations of them. How children suffer their parents’ failures, and the ways we imagine that we fail them and how far short of their expectations we fall.

But what won me over here was the language: lyrical, smooth as watered silk, the apt and unexpected turns of descriptive phrase. The sentences that stretch and reach and pull our attention along like poems of lyrical intensity. It’s a tour de force of beautiful prose. The straight up best prose writing I’ve seen in a long time.”