2023 ILS Fiction and Poetry Contest
In partnership with Fence!
Congratulations to the winners of the 2023 Fiction and Poetry Contest!
In fiction, congratulations to
1st prize: Pauls Toutonghi, “Beloved Ghosts”
2nd prize: Itoro Bassey, “How Eno Became Enobong”
3rd prize: Joe Eichner, “The Sky is Blue”
In poetry, congratulations to
1st prize: Mary Gilliland, “Able,” “Lincoln in Another Bardo,” and “Stitched in His Best”
2nd prize: Stephen de Búrca, “River Mouth,” “Anniversary,” and “On a Roadside Bench”
3rd prize: Migwi Mwangi, “Ngaahika Ndeeda”
Pauls Toutonghi’s parents were both refugees to the United States. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an Andrew W. Mellon research fellowship, a Fulbright Grant, and a residency at Hawthornden Castle. He has written for The New Yorker, Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, Outside Magazine, VQR, Granta, Tin House, and other periodicals. His third novel, The Refugee Ocean, will be published on October 3, 2023.
Itoro Bassey is a Nigerian-American author and journalist based in Washington, DC. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Prairie Schooner, Catapult, and The Book Smugglers, among others. Her body of work focuses on identity, ancestry, and migration. She is a producer and journalist at the BBC, with a special focus on highlighting U.S.-Africa relations. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree at Smith College in African-American Studies, with a Theatre minor, and her Masters in teaching at the Marlboro Graduate Institute.
She has received fellowships from the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards and won third place in Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. She has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Fund short story prize.
Itoro relocated to Africa in 2018 and lived between Kenya, Ethiopia, and Nigeria for five years. Currently she’s working on a memoir chronicling these experiences.
Joe Eichner is a writer from Chicago. His stories have been published in Jewish Currents, The Barcelona Review, Soft Punk Magazine, and The Brooklyn Review, among others. He recently completed a novel co-written with his identical twin brother.
Mary Gilliland’s award-winning collections are The Devil’s Fools and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden. Her poems are anthologized in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 annual; Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice; Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose; and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. After college she and her husband-to-be apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills, studying Buddhism and helping build a wood-framed public school. She is a past recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a Council on the Arts Faculty Grant from Cornell, where she taught such seminars as ‘Ecosystems & Ego Systems’ and ‘America Dreaming.’ Mary has also taught at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, Chautauqua, and Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies, and been a featured reader at the Al Jazeera International Film Festival. Forthcoming poetry collections include In the Pool of the Sea's Shoulder from Dancing Girl Press in 2023 and Ember Days from Codhill in 2024. She lives in Ithaca, NY. Find her at https://marygilliland.com/ and @newsthatstays.
Stephen de Búrca is a Ph.D. candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Belfast and received an M.F.A. from the University of Florida. From Galway City in Ireland, he was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions 2023 series, and his work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, Crannóg, Abridged, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
Thank you to all who entered. We received 400 submissions from many corners of the world and feel honored to have read so many excellent submissions. The competition was fierce!
A huge thank you also to our contest partners Fence Magazine and Books, who selected the winners and will be publishing the winning entries in Fence issue #42, forthcoming in late Spring 2024.
In the next few days, we will be sending emails to a select number of contest runners-up to award partial fellowships to attend our program in Kenya (Dec. 5 - 20, 2023), so keep your eye on your inbox.
That said, don't wait to apply.
The number of spaces in the program is strictly limited, and we expect them to be filled within the next few days. However, there's still time to seize this opportunity to hone your craft with top international writers and editors in the inspiring settings of Nairobi and Lamu.
Whether you entered the contest or not, we recommend applying now. All contest fellowship awards will be deducted from your tuition upon acceptance.
About Fence
In continuous publication since 1998, Fence is a biannual print journal of poetry, fiction, art, and criticism that redefines the terms of accessibility by publishing challenging writing distinguished by idiosyncrasy and intelligence rather than by allegiance with camps, schools, or cliques. As a nonprofit, Fence is committed to publishing from the outside and the inside of established communities of writing, seeking always to interrogate, collaborate with, and bedevil all the systems that bring new writing to light.
2022 ILS Fiction Contest Winners: Radhiya Ayobami, Steve Bunk, and Kyra Simone