Shenandoah literary prize winners announced

The annual winners of “Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review’s” literary prizes in prose are Ashley Davidson’s “A Daring Undertaking” for the “Shenandoah” Fiction Prize and Clinton Crocket Peters’s “Going to a Burn” for the Tom Carter Nonfiction Prize. The winner of the James Boatwright Prize for Poetry is Jane Fuller’s “Conversation with Two-Time All Mid-American Conference Relief Pitcher Douglas Dean Stackhouse on Winning, Losing and Learning to Fiddle.” All three pieces can be found in Volume 64, No. 2 of shenandoahliterary.org.

Jane Fuller’s poem is an agile spiel about a jar of rotting zinnias, a baseball career, “Macbeth” and “Cripple Creek.” She is co-author of a book of poems and prints, “A Story of Many Lives.” Fuller teaches at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio, and has previously published in “Denver Quarterly,” “Pikeville Review” and“Aethlon.” She is at work on a manuscript entitled “The Torturer’s Horse.”

Ashley Davidson lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and has published in “Meridian,” “Five Chapters,” “Nashville Review” and “Sou’wester.” Her story is a narrative told through letters that focuses on a survivor of the U. S. Army’s notorious experiment with camels in the west before the Civil War. “Shenandoah” Editor R. T. Smith says, “‘A Daring Undertaking’ is “a tour de force of 19th-century idiom by turns elegant and earthly, always suspenseful.”

Native Texan Clinton Peters has been a radio DJ, a wilderness guide and an English teacher in Japan. His work has been published in “Green Mountains Review,” “American Literary Review” and “Los Angeles Review.” He is currently working on a Ph.D. and teaching at the University of North Texas. “Going to a Burn” is a first-person account of the discoveries of an amateur volunteer accompanying a team of professional forest-fire fighters going on a back burn, where they face danger and beauty.

Shenandoah’s prizes are not the result of a traditional contest but have for several decades been selected from among the work published in a volume year. Each prize is accompanied by an honorarium of $500. This is the first time all three winners have been graduates of the prestigious Iowa Writing Workshop.