Howling Bird Press is pleased to announce the winner of our 2017 prize in nonfiction: Still Life with Horses by Jean Harper, which the press will publish in fall of this year. Jean Harper’s first book Rose City: A Memoir of Work won the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been supported by residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Indiana University East and lives and writes on a hundred-year-old horse farm in northern Indiana. Her website is  www.jeanharper.org

We also send hearty congratulations to the finalists for this year’s competition (in alphabetical order by last name):

Steve Fellner, I Wanted to Eat Lightbulbs and Other Essays

Matthew Ferrence, Field Trips 

Gary Fincke, The Darkness Call

J.L. Schneider, Cusichaca Moonshine

Fred Taylor, Migrating Toward Home

Gail Waldstein, The Mother Factor

We received many wonderful submissions, and we are grateful to all the authors who entrusted us with their work–it was a pleasure to read them all.

Our next contest will be open to poetry manuscripts. Submission dates are April 15 to June 30, 2017, and manuscripts are uploaded at our Submittable page, where further guidelines will be posted:  https://augsburghowlingbirdpress.submittable.com/submit. There is a $25.00 entry fee.

The previous winners of our contests are Jacob M. Appel’s short story collection The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street (2016) and Marci Vogel’s poetry collection At the Border of Wilshire and Nobody (2015).