The Southern Review is pleased to announce our Pushcart Prize nominees for 2011!
Poetry nominees are Kevin Prufer for his long poem “Potential Energy Is Stored Energy,” which begins, “When the bomb tore through the train, / it cut the first-class cabin into halves,” and TSR’s own previous resident scholar, Jen McClanaghan, for “Infinite Melancholy,” in which she writes, “I’ll take a day at a cold beach with the dog, / which, in winter, is the right kind of loneliness, // because you’re not born into it / like a fox into his fur.”
Nonfiction nominees are Peggy Shinner’s “Berenice’s Hair,” a gorgeous lyric essay on hair’s cultural history, and Abe Streep’s “Shaken by a Low Sound,” an outstanding and funny profile of bluegrass virtuoso Rushad Eggleston, self-proclaimed “wild snee goblin” who has created an imaginary world full of “elves, goblins, weasels” and his own invented creature, the “thnark.”
Fiction nominees are Jaquira Díaz for her wry, moving story “Section 8” (“I looked over my shoulder at the benches behind me, at the families of all the other juvenile delinquents, the empty spot where my people were supposed to be. A wake-up call was the last thing I needed”), and Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry for her expertly rendered portrait of two young women’s complicated friendship in “Champions of the World” (“Milka Putova and I had been friends since the first grade, which was pretty much for as long as I could remember. She was short and thin like a sprat, and every boy in our class called her exactly that—Sprat”).
Our congratulations and thanks to all the nominees for their excellent work.