The dust has settled…

…and revealed our Shadow Award winners.

Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. We’re happy to announce the first-ever poems that will be published in The Molotov Cocktail—the winners and honorable mentions for our Shadow Award contest. As with any new endeavor, we weren’t quite sure what to expect for this poetry contest, but you all turned in some truly dark, strange, and unsettling stuff. Primary contest judge Mary Lenoir Bond had her work cut out for her, and she put in many long, painstaking hours of deliberation. She also had the following to say:

Thank you to everyone who entered our Shadow Award contest! What a pleasure it was to read all of your work. I fully expect one of these days a few of your books will be added to my vast shelves. Please follow my new(ish) blog and see my most recent post, where I discuss more about our contest judging process. I plan to write more about the flash fiction contests very soon, and speaking of that, I’m insanely excited to read the Flash Icon stories for August! I wish I could enter it as well, heh.

Thank you again, you wonderful weirdos, you fellows of freakdom. – Mary Lenoir Bond

We were also happy to see poems trickle in from all around the globe. Sure, we saw a good share from our compatriots here in the States, but we also saw a strong response from Canada, the U.K. and Ireland, with other entries coming in from Australia, Greece, Malaysia and elsewhere! The poets whose work will be featured in our Shadow Award mega-issue can revel in the fact that they will literally be read all around the world (still working on a marketing strategy to break into Antarctica). 

Though this contest has reached its end, we’ve always got something cooking at tMC. Our next quarterly flash fiction contest, Flash Icon, is now accepting submissions at an early-bird rate. That contest will require writers to include an iconic person, place, or thing, and we hope you get real weird with it.

But now on to the good stuff. We had an exceptional number of high-quality submissions whose authors are worthy of mention. However, we capped our non-cigar shout-outs at 20. 

Close-but-no-cigar mentions go to:

Ian Barbosa
F.E. Clark
Ophelia Darkly
Forrest DePoy
Laura Garrison
John Gosslee
Rosemary Harris
Sean Hooks
Zebulon Huset
David Marston (2)
Kathleen McCoy
Sheena Power
Carrie Redway
G.G. Silverman
James Stewart
Elijah Tubbs
G.D. Watry
Stephen Scott Whitaker
MB Vigil

We are truly grateful to have the chance to read each and every entry that came in. Your hard work and creative minds are what make these contests a success.

The Top 10 that you’ll find below will be published in our forthcoming Shadow Award poetry mega-issue, which will run by Friday, June 17th. They will also be included in this fall’s second-annual Prize Winners Anthology print issue, which will feature the Top 10 finishers from our quarterly flash fiction contests as well. You can check out last year’s Prize Winners Anthology here. 

 And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like.

10th Place – “The Black Dog and Goat” by Forrest DePoy

9th Place – “A Water Can Sprays a Flowerbed City” by John Gosslee

8th Place – “Changeling” by Hannah Craig

7th Place – “Persephone Hangs Insulation” by Elizabeth Vignali

6th Place – “Visitation” by Frances Klein

5th Place – “Mud Ceremony” by Sara Ryan

4th Place – “The Divine Heap” by Amanda Chiado

And now for the poems we really couldn’t keep our hands off.

3rd Place ($50)

“Children of the Damp”
by Brett Schweitzer

2nd Place ($100)

“Stark Raving Naked”
by Christopher P. Mooney

1st Place ($200)

“The Devil’s Taken His Dress Off”
by Amanda Chiado

Congrats to the winners and a huge thanks to everyone who participated in our first-ever poetry contest.We literally couldn’t do this without you. Check back by Friday, June 17th for the Shadow Award mega-issue!