To honor the best writing to appear in our pages each year, VQR created the Emily Clark Balch Prize and the Staige D. Blackford Prize. Past recipients include John Berryman, Robert Olen Butler, Philip Caputo, Pauline W. Chen, Carolyn Forché, and Natasha Trethewey. The VQR Prize for Photography was created to recognize the best photo essay to appear in VQR. Each prize includes a monetary award of $1,000.
We congratulate the following prizewinners for 2014.
Emily Clark Balch Prize for Fiction
Greg Jackson, “Serve-and-Volley, Near Vichy” (Fall)
Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry
T J Jarrett, “Anarcha: J Marion Sims Opens My Body for the Thirty-Fourth Time”; “1973: My Mother Cleaves Herself in Two”; “Late That Summer”; “Theodore Bilbo Attends My Sickbed” (Summer)
Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction
Jason Motlagh, “The Ghosts of Rana Plaza” (Spring)
The VQR Prize for Photography
Atish Saha, “The Ghosts of Rana Plaza” (Spring)