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Amelia Gray has selected Emily Koon as the 2015 Innovative Short Fiction Contest winner for her short story, “The People Who Live in the Sears.”
Amelia chose this this story “for its life and humor, its world-building and pace.” She also noted “I found the really unique thing about this story was its movement; it first sits in one place like a man on a couch at the Sears, picking up little objects and people and turning them over. Then, it moves quickly from room to room and then from house to house, swallowing up forests. The story closes in on a shopper or a person and then widens out just as quickly. On top of all that, it’s funny; a little George Saunders, a little Don Barthelme, but best of all a lot of its own thing, the neon Jazzercize glory of the 80s going up like the asbestos-fueled fire it features.”
Emily Koon lives in North Carolina. She earned her MFA from Emerson College in Boston. She has work in Portland Review, Bayou, Atticus Review, and other places and can be found at twitter.com/thebookdress.
This year’s finalists were Rita Bullwinkel, Adrian Fort, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Marina Petrova, and Adam Webster. Honorable mentions include Michelle Donahue, Regan Douglass, and Kim Hagerich.
The Conium Review editorial staff thanks everybody who submitted and supported our annual Innovative Short Fiction Contest. We’ll announce next year’s judge soon, and we hope many of you will consider submitting again in 2016.