The AWP Intro Journals Project is a literary competition for the discovery and publication of the best new works by students currently enrolled in AWP member programs. Winners are published in participating literary journals: Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Mid-American Review, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Reed Magazine, and Tampa Review.
Read excerpts from the 2024 winning pieces, all of which are available now or forthcoming.
Creative Nonfiction
selected by Celeste Chan
from “Speculation”
Michael Chapin
Davidson College
Tampa Review
Story and fact blur into an amalgamation I call memory. I was left on the doorstep of the orphanage. Like Harry Potter, someone once said. Yes, the only difference is that my scar is somewhere you can’t see and it’s shaped like a jagged question mark. When it was time for my parents to take me from the orphanage, my caregiver cried as I was pried from her arms. I was a quiet baby, wide-eyed and watchful as if, even back then, I knew my tongue would whisper at the margins. I was close friends with one of the other kids who was adopted at the same time as me: his name is Luke, and when he and his parents visit us eighteen years later, I find I like his sister better. My birthday is September 11, 2001. Yes, that day. Except, as it just occurred to me the other day that perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I have ‘estimated’ inked next to the date on my birth form. I have never asked to see them.
Perhaps I am too afraid to know. I imagine anyway.
from “My Identity Is Disputed Territory”
Maggie Dressler
Penn State University Park
Reed Magazine
It feels lonely in that minivan. The only other entity inside is the creature made of the questions about my identity that have been with me for almost my entire life, growing and developing as I did until I sit here as an adult. They sit beside me, not a person, but just as real, a being formed from questions, confusion, tears of rage and broken sadness, hopelessness, loss, gathered over the course of my existence until they too are the size and shape of a full-grown adult. When I reach out to touch them, to hold the hand of the being that’s been my companion for over eighteen years of life, I can’t. Questions are ultimately just questions, doubts just doubts, fear just fear, loss and grief just loss and grief, so even though these things are so real and so powerful that I can see them in everything I do, they will never be tangible, so they’ll just be here, unable to be fully embraced. Every feeling of identity-less-ness, every pain, whether piercing or numbing or throbbing or dull, every one is all here next to me because they had to go somewhere, and that somewhere is, apparently, with me all the time. They sit there across from me, staring at me as I look through the windows at the war raging around me.
from “Camden County Folk Medicine”
Nina King Sannes
University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
Colorado Review
There are certain institutions to which money is not only a passport, but an atlas, a phrasebook. There are places that are prohibitive by intimidation. Hospitals, doctor’s offices, were some such for my family. When at age ten I broke my arm on the school playground, my parents drove recklessly fast through the switchback turns of rural Virgina to reach me before I was loaded onto the ambulance—this machine that breathed money, spurted it from the exhaust, wafted like stink from the collars of EMTs. They drove me to three different hospitals, trying to find one that would take their insurance, a process that took hours.
At age fifteen, while doing practice exercises for the southeast regional spelling bee, my heart began to stutter and stop for seconds at a time. My father was asleep on the couch, reticent to stir, but I shook him awake, asking to be taken to the hospital. He drove me instead to the fire station down the highway. Here, the volunteer firefighter was startled by the sight of a hysterical teenage girl and her hulking (and later, I would learn, dead drunk) father, but he sat me down and took my pulse on a finger monitor, and told me I was fine. It wasn’t for four more years of incidents like this that I was diagnosed with a genetic heart condition, easily treatable by medication.
On the worst day of your life, after injury, after bereavement, it can feel insane to think about money—but there is no other option. Capital enables life. If you’re going to accrue that bill, it better be for a good reason.