Prairie Schooner announced Jordan Walker as the winner of the 2023 Summer Nonfiction Essay Contest for their essay, “Island of Misfits.”
Walker is a writer from Cleveland, Ohio. They are an Master’s of fine Arts candidate at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington where they work as a teaching assistant and instructor of creative writing. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Shore and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Walker will receive a prize of $1000, and their essay will appear in the Spring 2024 edition of the journal.
The contest was judged by Siddhartha Deb of Harlem, New York, whose fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Guardian, New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1 and Caravan.
Of Walker’s essay, Deb said, “I picked ‘The Island’ as the winner for its ability to vividly render a time and place and pull me into that as a reader. I found its exploration of childhood — and the difficult, broken world of adults as perceived through the eyes of a child — to be moving, full of empathy for all the characters, no matter how flawed. Within its dynamic of a family troubled by various kinds of loss, the writer successfully brought in considerations of nature, consumption, and masculinity, and in that achieved a kind of larger truth.”
Zainab Omaki and John Kuligowski, who serve as the Schooner’s nonfiction assistant editors, also had high praise for Walker’s essay.
Kuligowski said: “The Island of Misfits” is an ominous and haunting reflection on parental neglect…. while the “Misfit” parents exult in a Bacchanal of bad behavior, their children are forced to fend for themselves in a postmodern all-American take on The Lord of the Flies.”
Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays and reviews by beginning, mid-career and established writers.
