[NOTE: The contest is closed at this time. Look for a new one to begin sometime in 2012.]
When Amanda was writing the stories that would become her first collection, Circling the Drain, she worked a number of ridiculous jobs to make ends meet. (At one point she was writing copy for television ads for newspaper tabloids.) Her second published story, “Fat Ladies Floated in the Sky Like Balloons,” appeared in the second issue of McSweeney’s and was everything we were looking for in fiction—it was bold, funny, experimental, lyrical, and ended without any conventional sort of resolution. She was at her best when she was at her most brave. Her first novel, Wonder When You’ll Miss Me, concerned a teenage girl who leaves high school under cloudy circumstances and joins the circus.
This memorial award is intended to aid a young woman writer of 32 years or younger who both embodies Amanda’s personal strengths—warmth, generosity, a passion for community—and who needs some time to finish a book in progress. The book in progress needn’t be thematically or stylistically close to Amanda’s work, but we would be lying if we said we weren’t looking to support another writer of Amanda’s outrageous lyricism and heart.
2010 Winner: CJ Hauser
2008 Winner: Shivani Manghnani
2006 Winner: Hannah Pittard
2004 Winner: Jessica Anthony
The first winner, Jessica Anthony, had her novel, The Convalescent, published by McSweeney’s in 2009; the second winner, Hannah Pittard, published her first novel, The Fates Will Find Their Way, with Ecco in early 2011.