We are pleased to present the winners of the 2022 Porch Prize, sponsored by Ingram Spark. Judges in the three categories for 2022 were as follows: Kevin Wilson (Fiction), Natalie Lima (Creative Nonfiction), and Marianne Worthington (Poetry). For information on the 2023 Porch Prize, please visit porchtn.org in Fall 2022 for updated information.
2022 Porch Prize in Poetry Winner:
Christian Collier, “Intervention”
Poetry Judge: Marianne Worthington
Marianne Worthington grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and moved to southeastern Kentucky in 1990 where she works as a teacher, editor & writer. In 2009 she co-founded Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to the Appalachian region. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Appalachian Book of the Year Award for her poetry chapbook, Larger Bodies Than Mine. She was awarded grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Appalachian Sound Archives Fellowship at Berea College. With Silas House she co-edited Piano in a Sycamore: Writing Lessons from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop, a craft anthology from teachers at the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop from the last 40 years. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford American, CALYX, Grist, Reckon Review, Cheap Pop, Appalachian Review, Feed, Ethel, and Chapter 16 among other places. She teaches communication studies and media writing to college students. She often teaches poetry and nonfiction writing classes for workshops and conferences.
University Press of Kentucky published her poetry collection, The Girl Singer, in late 2021.
2022 Porch Prize in Fiction Winner:
Sophia Huneycutt, “Bellow”
Fiction Judge: Kevin Wilson
Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bestseller and a Read with Jenna book club selection. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Southern Review, One Story, A Public Space, and elsewhere, and has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2020 and 2021, as well as The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the KHN Center for the Arts. He lives in Sewanee, Tennessee, with his wife, the poet Leigh Anne Couch, and his sons, Griff and Patch, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Sewanee: The University of the South.
2022 Porch Prize in Creative Nonfiction Winner:
Jardana Peacock, “Swell, the Story of the Sailor and the Mermaid”
Creative Nonfiction Judge: Natalie Lima
Natalie Lima is a Cuban-Puerto Rican writer, raised in Las Vegas, NV and Hialeah, FL. She is a first-generation college graduate of Northwestern University and a graduate of the MFA program in creative nonfiction writing at the University of Arizona. Her essays and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Catapult, Sex and the Single Girl (Harper Perennial, 2022), Body Language (Catapult, 2022), and elsewhere. Lima’s writing has been honored in Best Small Fictions (2020), and noted twice in Best American Essays (2019 and 2020). Her work has received support from PEN America Emerging Voices, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House, the VONA/Voices Workshop, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and Hedgebrook. In fall of 2022, Lima will join the creative writing faculty at Butler University as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. She is currently working on a memoir and an essay collection.