We are thrilled to announce the results of our 2019 contests! With over 1,200 entries, we had a wonderful time reading and a hard time choosing our finalists. Thank you to everyone who entered. The winning pieces will be published in the forthcoming months, right here on Hunger Mountain Online. Thank you to our talented assistant […]
Dana Lyons lives and works as a user interface designer in Pittsburgh, PA. Using language, vector graphics, and vibrant colors, her work often explores the intersection of ethical design, technology, and human behavior. Lyons received her MFA in Graphic Design from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2018, and she was recently awarded the Hunger […]
Hunger Mountain 24: Patterns We’re excited to announce that the theme for our 2020 print issue, Hunger Mountain #24, is “Patterns.” Patterns can be worn or flown. Bees dance them. Humans walk them daily. Patterns can be mundane or systemic. Tibetan monks make mandalas, then blow them away. Ancient cultures left their trace in how […]
Fiction
First Place Winner
Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Fiction
Runner-Up
Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Fiction
Honorable Mention
Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
Fiction
Honorable Mention
Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
The long fever of summer looks like broken at last, there’s a coolness that the hours, more and more, leave behind them as they tumbleweed their way to wherever it is finished hours go to. Here, finished isn’t the same as lost, at all, is this true where you are? When I lie down in […]
La Negra is a beastgirl. From forehead to heel callused. Risen on an island made of shit bricks: an empire. The doctor pulled La Negra from her mother’s throat: a swallowed sword: rosary beads. La Negra’s father is a dulled sugarcane machete. Crowned in her sun-dried umbilical cord, La Negra […]
Creative Nonfiction
First Place Winner
Creative Nonfiction Prize
Creative Nonfiction
Runner-Up
Creative Nonfiction Prize
Creative Nonfiction
Honorable Mention
Creative Nonfiction Prize
Poetry
First Place Winner
Ruth Stone Poetry Prize
Poetry
Runner-Up
Ruth Stone Poetry Prize
Poetry
Honorable Mention
Ruth Stone Poetry Prize
You can purchase Hunger Mountain’s Issue 23: Silence & Power (Spring 2019) for $12 or as part of a 2-year subscription. POETRY Rosebud Ben-Oni: “Efes Wrestling with the Poet Who Won’t Look Away” and “Poet Wrestling with Neutrinos She {Allegedly} Cannot Feel” Recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and […]
“And the difference was all the difference there was.” ~ Toni Morrison I’m hard pressed to say America without sounding like a terrorist. I’m a guest here. I arrived with a few syllables lashed to my back. One of them is bitch. I wear it like a white dress made for your funeral. Here […]
A scientist and a writer, Andrea Rothman knows more than a thing or two about smell. She was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate at the Rockefeller University in New York, where she won two individual grants from the National Institute of Health to study the neurobiology of olfaction. She went on to earn […]
Young Adult Fiction
Overall Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize
Picture Book
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize for YA and Children’s Writing
Weird Trans Kid’s bladder is the size of a squirrel— not a squirrel’s bladder, but an actual squirrel, a chubby gray one. Weird Trans Kid doesn’t know which restroom to use. Is tired of all mainstream trans politics revolving around restrooms. Thinks restrooms are improperly named. Wants to rename them anxietyrooms. Wants to rename them […]
–an excerpt from her memoir, Little Boats Six years after my name was gifted to me, my parents moved us to the Swinomish Reservation. There was tribal land in the family and my parents saw an opportunity for an easier life. I saw a dark forest and a lack of ocean. I thought I’d be […]
There is a crush of Storm Troopers, Men of Steel, and Optimus Primes milling around the cavernous confines of the Javits Center. Surrounded by freaks and geeks, Astrid Atangana wonders how she and her friends—the self-styled Nyanga Girlz—come across to the Comic Con crowd. Mbola, rocking grills and street gear, calling herself “Fly Girl: Superman’s […]
Sabrina took a shortcut to the party through the field between the Manor House and the Gehry building. The field was supposed to have ticks but no one at Bard cared. People were scoring crack on trips to Brooklyn, sporting fluorescent sores at parties. If you whined about ticks, people would call you a pussy […]
Hunger Mountain is pleased to announce its new International Young Writers Prize! This contest is open to all high school writers from around the world, and all genres of creative writing: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and writing for children. Students in Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA Program in Writing & Publishing will judge submissions and choose […]
2019 Deadline is March 1! Click here for guidelines and to enter the contest. The 2019 judges are: Erika T. Wurth – Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize Elissa Washuta – Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize Monica Brown – Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing Natalie Diaz – Ruth Stone Poetry Prize […]
Congrats to Hunger Mountain contributors and editors who have been named notables in Best American Essays 2018, Best American Short Stories 2018, and Best American Poetry 2018: Katherine Schaefer, Notable Essay 2017 for “Edna, with Her Mouth,” published on Hunger Mountain’s website. Brenda Peynado, Distinguished Short Story 2017 for “The Man I Could Be,” published in Hunger Mountain Issue […]
We’re beyond excited to announce this year’s guest editors, three writers we’ve long admired. We can’t wait to view Hunger Mountain through their creative lenses. Please help us welcome: 2019 Guest Poetry Editor // Natalie Scenters-Zapico Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, U.S.A., and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, […]
Middle Grade
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize
Callie, our narrator, has a keen eye for observation and takes us into her childhood in a tourist-rich yet sleazy Florida, set vividly in the late-seventies and onwards. We begin with her as a six-year-old and end with her leaving on her own at eighteen. Her mother is a forgetful and irresponsible drunk, one who […]
Young Adult
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize
Sugar Land is the story of one hell of a character called Miss Dara. The novel, divided into three sections, is set in 1920’s Texas, and spans Miss Dara’s whole life. We meet her as a 19-year-old when she falls for her best friend, Rhodie. The attraction is mutual and they spend a few weeks […]
Picture Book
Honorable Mention
Katherine Paterson Prize
You will remember how he moved toward you, hazard-handed, uttering your language—that pidgin of the partially recovered self. And you still won’t have learned, although you know the story well, won’t ever catch the flown bird of your breath, remembering how, still keen, still cold as a machine, Lust polished off your beer, relit your […]
Picture Book
Honorable Mention
Katherine Paterson Prize
The Binti trilogy resides for me in that corner of the Appalachian Mountains I first picked it up: 14.5 acres of oak trees, milkweed, and a prolific flora only Nnedi Okorafor could bring back to memory with renewed magic and beauty. What I read in her novellas came alive in the landscape. Okarafor, the magnetic […]
I smile at a cop for the first time in years—her skin Of caramel & whey, kissed the way French kiss to say Bonjour, not Je te veux, by a pale woman who, like her, Dons wolves’ flesh, the darkest blue, which should quicken My gait, exacerbate the arrhythmia that’s my birthright. I want you, […]
after Carol Ann Duffy’s “Prayer” Dear Audubon Society: I would like to participate in The Great Backyard Bird Count, your annual citizen-science project that tracks the migra- tion and population of native species. I have a few questions: Why only in February? Do dead birds count? What about caged birds? Should I look […]
For almost forty years I have been alive, and the magnitude of my unknown grows before me, its shape the shadow of an occult creature occluded, eclipsed, unmade by its elder. Certainty shows itself little by little. It is something I cannot recognize until it has dressed in a faraway forest and passed close by […]
Its beneficiaries ordinary in their disgrace, made to break at lathe or lumber mill, they like to say. Fruit bruised before the fall, broken open beneath the tree, they are liquor for wasps and ruined gods, rust-riven and rat- gnawed. They croon funereal rights, conceal what they carry. Of them, the garment rent by […]
Just what I needed. It was a snowy afternoon in Vermont and I was bored. I picked up Moderow’s Fast into the Night: A Woman, Her Dogs, and Their Journey North on the Iditarod Trail from the pile of books next to my bed. I started the memoir and then put it down. Why? I knew […]
Wonderfully absurd and weird stories fill this collection by Bryan Hurt. His characters range from astronaut-artists, a British aristocrat with his adopted girls, a goat and seagull questioning the afterlife on the edge of a cliff, and a run-down American writer panicking about the demands of his agents. The opening lines are often so succinct […]
The songs of birds are call and response. Woodpecker rhythmically answers a hummingbird’s song. Kindness is dropping a leaf onto an earthworm’s back to shield it from sunlight. Quiet is as loud as a bird’s call. Adrienne Rich was haunted by a line in an Elizabeth Bishop poem: “Love should be put into action!” Tonight […]
The Crazy Lady groaned up against the bad side of I-35. It wasn’t much from the outside—a squatty, stucco lump of a strip club, perched perilously close to the interstate edge, its façade ground smooth by relentless traffic grit. This was where Austin girls went when they’d been fired from the clubs with valet parking […]
I know tongues of fire as tall as men, autumn sap, red panties, a stack of sparklers lit, riotous laughter, a field of poppies, circus acts. I know mistakes: how fire tastes. I keep a scarlet dress for when day skirts the hill with its hem and ladybugs cover the bedroom ceiling. Tomatoes split like […]
Young Adult Fiction
Honorable Mention
Katherine Paterson Prize
Middle Grade
Honorable Mention
Katherine Paterson Prize
here. at the dumb stroke of midnight. in the glass dome of roses. the woods at the end of the lake. I was taught where to wait patiently. to fold my hands on my lap like two sorry doves. to tie my shoes in knots too tight to unravel. it’s incredible how the oceans meet […]
Neil Gaiman doesn’t know this but I’m devastated that the one time I lived as an NYC-expat was when he reigned as Neptunian king at this year’s Mermaid Parade. So, this summer, instead of reveling in my usual Coney Island haunts, I decided to grow a fishtail in my bathtub as I read the short […]
I laid down at your door a white bowl of milkweed houndstongue lupins cape tulips & juniper a garland big enough to kill a thirsty horse I like my peace like flower or fire wild you can bring a horse to water you can force it to swim but you can’t trust what comes after […]
don’t call me goddess peace is armed like any man if the ocean is burning oil close your eyes when you come up to breathe lungs float the heart does not the ship is under quarantine often in life there are two choices die or come clean the people do not want an ocean they […]
Doug Lawson’s collection of short stories, Bigfoots in Paradise, is set in and around Santa Cruz, California, between Silicon Valley and the Pacific Ocean. There are eight stories, each about 20-30 pages, and many have been previously published in journals such as Gargoyle, Glimmer Train, and Mississippi Review, amongst others. Doug Lawson writes with confidence, […]
There’s a Korean word, Han. I looked it up. There is no literal English translation; it’s a state of mind; of soul, really. A sadness. A sadness so deep no tears will come. And yet still, there’s hope. — Josiah Bartlet, “The West Wing” Profile: DOB 1974/USA/Female/Korean Developed Disorders: Generalized Anxiety, Bipolar, Panic, […]
1. My husband and I don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day. If we remember the date, we might splurge on chocolates or a nice meal at a restaurant (usually, breakfast or lunch because dinner reservations for that night must be made five months in advance, which neither of us remembers to do, plus it costs as […]
We are thrilled to announce the results of our 2018 contests! With nearly 1,200 entries, we had a wonderful time reading and a hard time choosing our finalists. Thank you to everyone who entered. The winning pieces will be published in the forthcoming months, right here on Hunger Mountain’s online companion. Thank you to our talented assistant […]
Heather—his youngest daughter, my sister, his baby, the one who always gave in when he needed money for rent or drugs—left me with her three girls outside McDonald’s, while she drove Dad for a carton of cigs and a Playboy. The girls forced me to play freeze tag. I picked at my fingernails, ripping off […]
Maggie Nowinski (MFAin Visual Art ’07) is an interdisciplinary visual artist, arts educator, and curator who lives and works in Western Massachusetts. Her work frequently exhibits throughout the New England region, as well as nationally. In addition to teaching at Westfield State University and Manchester Community College, Maggie also serves as an Artist-Teacher mentor for […]
In Guardian Angels & Other Monsters, Daniel H. Wilson’s short story collection invites us to consider the question: How far would you go to provide for your children? “The Executor,” a noir-esque short story, reimagines a hypercapitalist future world in which the descendants of the galaxy’s richest man have fought centuries-long wars over their vast […]
My spine is strung together by a string of shattered stars. Neck wrung, I’m a dead swan floating in a moat—an amusement park ride, the fairgrounds abandoned. A stork stands in her nest atop the Ferris wheel, the emerald cascade of kudzu like a shawl for the steel skeleton, I stood at the stove in […]
I must run: walking won’t get me there. Miles must take the place of arms; distance, embrace. I must run, until I become air. * Conditioning is a whisper on the eyelash of an eye that doesn’t blink, afraid of missing seconds pass. * Conditioning is the day spent hinting: a bee working his wings […]
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Hogarth Shakespeare Project began inviting novelists in 2015 to reimagine the Bard’s canon in contemporary works of fiction. A number of writers were contacted, such as Howard Jacobson, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, and Jo Nesbø, a Norwegian author primarily known for his Harry Hole series of […]
Michael A. Ferro’s darkly comedic debut novel, TITLE 13, is the story of a missing government census document, a deep and complex relationship with home and family, a man losing himself to alcoholism, and the usual contenders: life, death, and love. It’s also the first documentation of the Midwest’s experience during The Great Recession that […]
Megan Hunter’s haunting debut novel, The End We Start From, explores a mother’s journey through London underwater. Immediately, the reader is gripped by Hunter’s visceral imagery, as she describes the protagonist, who is preparing to give birth as “a lumbering gorilla with a low-slung belly and suspicious eyes.” Through Hunter’s poetic prose and honest revelations, readers […]
My father sits at the kitchen table with his shoulders hunched, staring at a feather cupped in his rough carpenter’s hands. Its barbs are clean and white. The table is bare except for the wooden box still encrusted with dirt. It has no latch, no key. My mother had to bash it open. The kitchen […]
A man doused in roebuck piss says I saw it as I skinned its thighs & laughs. Your death always a joke, the shock of womb, a punchline. Darting through the underbrush, even your hooves resounded like cackling children. This velvet crown was not always a betrayal— In rutting season, the tongues of stags & […]
One thing about fear is that it’s stronger than the average human body. Another thing about fear is that it spreads quickly in large crowds. The Director wants his viewers to keep these facts in mind when watching his film. He realizes, of course, that this isn’t about what he wants; he was commissioned to […]
In this garden a draft of summer plays across the prayer flags. A handful of slugs marched into the Worcestershire sauce and drowned themselves last night. The red dog is tired and smells like dirt and air. In this graveyard you ask her again to tell you how the moon moves. In another you are […]
What you see on the corn is what you’ll get, and the cattle come to the fence in hopes of hay. During seven years of corn, like the sand of the sea, like amber floating, we wore the king’s ring on our fingers. We swore the sun and moon and stars bowed down to us. […]
Dad, you are not all right. This business of being a cake, the cake left in the rain. These claims and drawings— family trees with great men and without mom. These phantom limbs. You’re sewing the velvet curtain shut. Come out. Say you are just a man. Art by Maggie Nowinski. Elizabeth Barnett lives in […]
One day Megi asked me how the third faerie war started, and I worried that if I gave the wrong answer, she would devour me. A lot of our friendship was like that. We were sitting on a picnic table near the park, our butts on the tabletop, our feet on the bench. Everywhere my […]
1 Everything that’s happening isn’t me doing it, it’s what the cold’s doing, the music’s doing, it’s what gravity’s doing to the guy and if I can’t imagine what it’s like how much less can someone outside the whole situation see it straight on when what somebody else is doing might be worse than what […]
You can purchase Hunger Mountain’s Issue 22: Everyday Chimeras (Spring 2018) for $12 or as part of a 2-year subscription. POETRY Angie Macri: “Remembrance: Dream, Palace of Drought” Angie Macri is the author of Underwater Panther (Southeast Missouri State University), winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize, and Fear Nothing of the Future or the Past (Finishing Line). Her recent work appears in Poetry, […]
Fusing fantasy, horror, gothic romance, and the supernatural, the stories of Minnesota-based Kelly Barnhill host a menagerie of undead magicians, poetic corpses, haunted witches, and evasive female pirates.
2018 Deadline Extended to March 15th! Click here for guidelines and to enter the contest. The 2018 judges are: Caroline Leavitt – Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize Pam Houston – Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize Sherwin Bitsui – Ruth Stone Poetry Prize Kekla Magoon – Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult & Children’s Writing Caroline […]
Green awnings have rusted. Time unstill you are unstill walking on a street stilled. Your mind holds the no longer market. You want to show me the market. You have crawled prison floors. Your son has done the same. You are the same the ceaselessness. Your mother served green […]
“You want to jump in the creek?” my mother asks. It’s a Tuesday night in late July and we’re on the porch drinking Myers’s rum doused with lemonade. She’s wearing cut-off cargo pants and a Grateful Dead T-shirt full of holes; her cracked toenails are the chartreuse of limes.
As a child in confirmation class, I am instructed in the holy math. “Seven is the number of completion,” our pastor says. “It took seven days for God to make the world, so seven days became the length of our earthly week.” He speaks to us as a single mass, the cloud and not the snowflakes, separate and unique.
“The Stuff Between the Stars“ is a story by Sandra Nickel, which was the Category Winner for Children’s Books in Hunger Mountain’s 2017 Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing. We are most grateful for author Sandra Nickel, editor Maggie Lehrman, and literary agent Victoria Wells Arms for taking the time to chat […]
Rodrigo took Rosa’s clothes out of his closet and laid them on the bed beside her toothbrush, face cream, and paperbacks. He called to say she could come for her things while he was at work. It was almost nine. He was shaved, scented, and ready to leave. “Trust me,” he said, “there’s nothing I […]
Recently, men have asked me to be their slut. And during the sex act, they say, almost universally, “You’re just a slut, aren’t you?” The mere idea of my promiscuity stiffens them. To them, it is hot and sexy.
Wonderland Anton is marching with his new friends, their shaved heads like tongues of fire floating along 82nd Avenue, the cars at night honking at them like they were vets just home from the war. He is marching with an old lie in his mouth, a lie like a rotten acorn, the acid taste of […]
Mammy Two Shoes, a fictional character in MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons, was a corpulent, achingly stereotypical black woman, seen only from the knees down. I am double negative charm, carrying the syrupy burden of your love in my yawning breaches of body. When I laugh, the sound is a knotted oil on each breath […]
We enter without tears and huddle in the sidehills. The children’s cries are like spears in our chests, so we trade our silence for hammers. In our sleep, behemoths descend upon us which we cannot shake even when first light flames over the eastern crests. We eat flesh of the great furred beasts and wolf […]
Once, my dad tried to give me the jacket the Army awarded him for serving in Korea. It looked like a varsity jacket, soft blue felt, pale arms. On the back it said, I know I’m going to heaven because I’ve been to hell. I was fifteen, and I thought a lot of my dad, […]
“The Knights need a teetotaler driver tomorrow, Jimbo,” Harlan Kittredge said. “Be you a teetotaler?” It was the evening of June 20. Tomorrow the White Knights of Temperance, formerly the Kingdom County Outlaws, were headed to Boston to catch the twin bill between the Sox and the Yankees. They’d gotten together tonight at the Common […]
Mama put a hand to her wide hip, plucked the cigarette from her mouth, and took a long look at Cliff. Pulled her eyeglasses halfway down her nose and said, “No you didn’t.” “Mama, be nice,” I said. It had taken five years and three days for me to build the courage to bring him […]
Fiction
Runner-Up
Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize
On their first date, a so-called blind one, Megan took Gregory by the hand and he let her. She led him into a space afflicted with mood lighting and for a moment he though it must be a bar, a remarkably empty one, but no, it was not a bar but an art gallery.
After a funeral, something wrestles from the wind, Flutters haphazardly close to your aching chest. Most likely it will fall to the cracked sidewalk. Stop walking. Consider it. You won’t understand What you are looking at, this sort of green would-be Katydid with dragonfly wings and limbs like a praying Mantis. It’s incapable of anything […]
I live in the North Shore of Long Island, the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. In theory, the bucolic landscape of sea grass, lush trees, and glittering water that surround me should provide the ideal framework for my fiction writing. But as a mother of seven-year-old twins with a household to manage, […]
Creative Nonfiction
Honorable Mention
Creative Nonfiction Prize
Young Adult Fiction
Overall Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize
Children’s Book
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize
Young Adult Fiction
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize in YA & Children’s Writing
Middle Grade Fiction
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize for YA & Children’s Writing
Middle Grade Fiction
Category Winner
Katherine Paterson Prize