Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our 2019 Winter Contest, which was judged by Ruth Madievsky, Ada Calhoun, and Ottessa Moshfegh. We want to thank everyone who entered the contest for sharing their work with us, as well as our three wonderful judges, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists.

“The Korean word jeong is untranslatable but the closest definition is ‘an instantaneous deep connection,’ often between Koreans,” Cathy Park Hong writes in her new essay collection Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. Perhaps this is one of the things the book accomplishes: building a deep and immediate sense of connection, intimacy and awareness. Minor Feelings moves between cultural criticism, memoir, history, and research, asking questions about Asian American identity, both collective and individual. The essays are provocative, as they are vulnerable and tender. Hong draws on her experiences of being raised in Koreatown, Los Angeles, fraught family dynamics, friendship and art, in order to understand the Asian American psyche. In this quest, she urges her readers to consider how we imbue people with preconceived stereotypes and expectations related to race.

“Me finding a new love interest had always been like a greedy child opening a toy on Christmas Day. I ripped the packaging open, got frustrated trying to make it work, played with it obsessively until it broke, then chucked the broken pieces of plastic in the back of a cupboard on Boxing Day.”

Columbia Journal is excited to announce the winners and finalists of our inaugural Black History Month Special Issue, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art. We want to thank everyone who submitted for creating art and sharing their work with us, and express our congratulations to the winners and finalists. You can click on the title of each piece to read it in full. All winners and runner-ups will be published on Wednesday, February 19th, or shortly thereafter.

It’s early evening on a weeknight when I turn on the local news. A high speed police chase is in progress. A suspect is fleeing from the cops, weaving his way through the San Fernando Valley streets with no obvious destination. The man’s arm is outside the window, hand open as if he’s grabbing the wind. I’m not surprised he’s black since most police chases in Los Angeles involve black and brown-skinned men. As the black mother of a teenage boy, I feel panicked thinking about the potential for police violence in this situation. Will they shoot first, then ask questions later? The suspect dictates the pace and rhythm of this rollicking cat and mouse game. If he speeds up, so do the police. When he slows down, the police will too. At some point, the power balance could shift. A wrong move by the suspect or an aggressive law enforcement attempt to end the chase with a spike strip or a pit maneuver could cause the driver to turn sideways, lose control and come to a stop. I am irresistibly drawn to this frightening scene

Now 84, Vivian Gornick has written an essay collection she could not have completed when she was younger. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, recently published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, is the product of a perspective that comes only with time. In this book, she describes her lifelong habit of reading and re-reading books. She notes the ways both the impact of those books and her interpretations of them have evolved as she has aged.

In this interview, Online Nonfiction Editor Vera Carothers spoke to Melissa Febos about being honest with yourself, dropping out of high school to become a writer, and her next essay collection Girlhood. Melissa Febos is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was widely named a best book of 2017. Her third book, Girlhood, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2021. Febos is the inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Verdone Writing Award from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation, The BAU Institute, Ucross Foundation, and Ragdale. The recipient of an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and an associate professor and graduate director at Monmouth University, her work has recently appeared in Tin House, Granta, The Believer, The Sewanee Review, and The New York Times.

At the Columbia Journal, we believe in creating space for and celebrating traditionally underrepresented voices. We seek out and support marginalized writers year-round, but this March marks our first ever Womxn’s History Month special issue. Our website will feature writing and creative expressions from artists reflecting the diversity of non-men, non-binary folx, women, and all those of marginalized genders. We are particularly interested in work related to the intersectionality of gender and other identities, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, nationality, immigration, age, sex, sexual and/or romantic orientation, class, and more.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Our badass and wonderful judges include Melissa Febos in nonfiction, Analicia Sotelo in poetry, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine in fiction.

Your memories of the museum are from your college years: visits and winter work terms when you come from Vermont and stay with the Siegels, your parents’ best friends. You feel valued, part of a family again, especially as a young woman among their three sons, always one of them in the midst of some sixties rebellion. The museum is a favorite destination. You head first to the top floor rotunda around the dome where most of the Monets are hung. There you can stand close to the paintings, examining the brush strokes, the mix of colors. But you can’t step back to see how they compose an object; you’d be in midair, three stories up. Somehow this delights you.

It’s a fruitful and useful thing to learn how to read like other people and those who are not like you. As each writer has a writing style, as each musician a method, a critic too, has a way of reading. Criticism done well, according to James Wood in the introduction of Serious Noticing, is bearing witness, “writing through a text,” a balance between the writerly, journalistic and scholarly.

The Columbia Journal is now open for submissions to our annual Spring Contest in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Winners of the Spring Contest will be published online on columbiajournal.org and will receive a cash prize of $250 each. Up to three finalists will also be selected and announced in each genre and published on our website, though there is no cash prize. Submissions open today on Submittable, and the deadline to submit is February 23rd, 2020. There is a $10 entry fee for each submission. More guidelines can be found here.

“I never imagined I’d write about boys,” Orenstein writes in her new book Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity. Her previous work, Girls & Sex, focused on modern sex and relationships for high school and college-aged young women. Despite this, three years after that book—now against a background of #MeToo, President Donald Trump, and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—Orenstein has shed light on the other side of the story. Through a combination of extensive interviews with young men and sociological research, the book seeks to move beyond the space of think pieces written by men and actually include them in the conversation. It gives readers a digestible overview of the problem.

Dear Chanel,

You write that your memoir Know My Name is “an attempt to transform the hurt inside myself, to confront a past, and find a way to live with and incorporate these memories.” This attempt reveals a myriad of fractures in the American judicial system. It also illuminates the reality of rape culture and chronicles your convalescence following a sexual assault by Stanford student Brock Turner that made headlines. I see this book as a reclamation of what the judge and the defense attempted to shut down: your voice. You offer guidance, critique, and analysis but through it all, you weave stunning descriptions, such as those of your home where you “watch the sun spill its yolk over the hills” and “smell the sun baking fallen shards of eucalyptus bark.”

As Ada Calhoun enters her forties, she suddenly finds herself staring at her son’s pet turtle, wondering if it wants something more from life. It sounds silly, but she realizes almost all of her female peers can relate. In Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Calhoun investigates why middle class Generation X American women (defined as those born between 1965 and 1980) are on the verge of “blowing it all up” in a different way from previous generations, haunted by what they did wrong and the versions of themselves that could have been. She writes, “How could women who wanted the challenging job and the financial independence, plus the full home life, still relate to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique?” or in other words, with all they have now, what is still missing?

Towards the end of her new book Incidental Inventions, Elena Ferrante reflects on the importance of storytelling: “An individual talent acts like a fishing net that captures daily experiences, holds them together imaginatively, and connects them to fundamental questions about the human condition.” This statement could be applied to the work as a whole, a collection of weekly columns the author wrote for The Guardian from January 2018 to January 2019 in response to questions provided by the newspaper’s editors.

It is perhaps a few days—three, to be exact—after her brother had called. They’d found her mother’s body. She’d been dead since Sunday.

“No!” she’d yelled. It really made no sense. No sense at all, she’d seen her mother days ago; she’d watched her mother’s disapproval of those expensive Parmesan crisps she’d bought melt into pleasure as they munched them with their coffee. Her mother was really a different woman.

Around three years ago, I felt a general sense of unease invade my being. It seemed that everyone around me, including strangers on the internet, possessed a core set of beliefs and values and I did not. I grew up in India and then moved to the United States for college and graduate school. The individualistic culture of the American college environment presented a stark contrast to my upbringing. It took me a while to realize that something different was expected of me in the U.S. I could no longer rely on straightforward adherence to the values of the collective. I instead had to develop my own unique system of values, my own beliefs about what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust. What a drag, I thought.

Jenny Slate is overwhelmed, and very sweet. Her book Little Weirds came out this month shortly after her Netflix special, “Stage Fright,” and an engagement announcement. Little Weirds is made up of micro-essays, sketches and fairy-sized windows into Slate’s mind. The collection hovers around a time in Slate’s life when being alive became joyless, painful and lonely in the worst way. At times, the book flits about too much, jumping into the surreal without warning. It’s disorienting. But when Slate hits a truth, which she does again and again, her perspective asserts itself with a gentle, earnest: Here I am!

For nearly 50 years, Lydia Davis has been producing short stories, novels, translations, and essays that try to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. She is considered the master of flash fiction, and some of her stories need only two sentences to leave a lasting mark. Her preoccupation with brevity, she says in her new book, Essays One, stems from her experiences writing poetry as an adolescent. But, at some point growing up, Davis realized that being a poet would not be a suitable profession for her. She didn’t want to be a novelist either, so she adopted short fiction as a way of channeling poetic energy. In Essays One, Davis’s talents as a writer of both poetic and prosodic tendencies are on full display.