Sundress Publications is thrilled to announce the results of the 2020 Prose and Short Story open reading period. The winning selection is: Jilly Dreadful’s COSMOBIOLOGICAL: Stories. The book is scheduled for release in the spring of 2021.
Of this collection, judge Saba Razvi, author of Heliophobia and In the Crocodile Gardens, says, ”The stories in COSMOBIOLOGICAL celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and the tricky net of narrative structures that connect us to each other and to the inexplicable realities of a world sometimes unreal its expression. Just as our mythologies remind us that energy is reshaped in the universe in unexpected ways, the energies of these multidimensional characters and their refractory worlds ricochet and resonate like cosmic blooms, reminding us that what is broken can sometimes still cut with the jagged edge of beauty even after the breaking. This collection is as intimate as it is diverse, as unusual as familiar. It reminds us of the strength that we build within ourselves from the wreckage of our dreams and remnant fumes of hope, taking us from the value of tears to the frailty of fire, from the expectation of rebellion to that of metamorphosis, from the lines that dictate surrender to the ones that embroider the ache of longing, and from the breath of the body to the dance of the cosmos.
By creating modern tales from threads of familiar hue, Jilly Dreadful weaves, in this collection, a shadow-scape that invites our curiosity and wonder, that devastates our tranquility, that reminds us of how intensely we long for the world when we make a cocoon for ourselves away from it, and that immerses us in a subversively critical exploration of human intimacy, perception, and culpability in the transgressive delights and derelictions of the psyche’s own orbiting bodies. In these times of transformation and heartache, the stories we encounter can give us the hopeful light and fire of stardust, the certainty that the world is bigger than our fears of it.”
Jilly Dreadful was born under a water sign and earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. Her stories are challenging like Pluto, but with the dreaminess of a Neptunian chaser, and can be found in places like Lightspeed Magazine, Rough Magick edited by Francesca Lia Block and Jessa Maria Mendez, and the first all-female Lovecraftian anthology, She Walks in Shadows. She is the creator of The Brainery: Online Speculative Fiction Workshops + Resources, which has been featured on Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy and Wired.com.
Finalists
Kneel Said the Night, Margo Berdeshevsky
Perilous Creatures, Jennifer Clark
Freak Lip: An Epistolary, Julia Cohen
Love and Other Creatures, Sarah Herrington
Guardians and Saints, Diane Josefowicz
Love and Other Mirages, Summer Keown
From Outer Space, Humans Are Aliens Too, Summer Koo
As Petals Fall on Asphalt Roads, Aimee Parkinson
The Body Remembers, Blake Planty
Nature and Other Fictions, Forrest Roth
Semi-Finalists
The Possibility of Fire: Stories, Jessica Barksdale
The Plagues, Joe Baumann
Last of the Icemen: Stories, Mark Baumgartner
The Paper Demon and Other Stories, Rosaleen Bertalino
Synonyms for Ghost, Guy Biederman
What I Saw, Randall Brown
Lessons from the Desert, Mariyah Converse
Love, Faith, and Other Stories, Cathy Cruise
A Delicate Pain, Karen Fayeth
Assisted Living: Stories, Erin Flanagan
The Truth About Psych Camp, Ann Gelder
The Fallen Ones, Michalle Gould
the futility of my kisses, RIP, Paula Harris
When the Glory Came Down, Rachel Holbrook
Carrion, Wes Jamison
Echo Frequency, Wes Jamison
Further Novella and Stories, Deborah Jannerson
May You Live Long Enough to Return Home, Yma Johnson
Housebound, Christina Kapp
Stay, Sarah Leamy
Children Will Drown, Rachel Luria
Mad Prairie, Kate McIntyre
Ball Breaker, Sherryl Melnyk
You Made This, Lisa Piazza
Tiny Monsters, CR Resetarits
To Such As These, Jeremy Schnotala
MOST HOLY SACRIFICE ONE’S OWN TONGUE, Heidi Staples
The Killdeer Lies, Alice Stinetorf
Things That May Save Us, Julie Trimingham
Tool & Die, Michelle Valois
Lesser American Boys, Zach VandeZande
Painted Ladies, Victoria Waddle
A 501(c)(3) non-profit literary press collective founded in 2000, Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run press that publishes chapbooks and full-length collections in both print and digital formats, and hosts numerous literary journals, an online reading series, and the Best of the Net Anthology.
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