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The 2016 Flash Fiction Contest winner is Kate Garklavs!

Kate G headshotLeesa Cross-Smith has finished deliberating, and she has selected Kate Garklavs‘s “In Memoriam: Lot 69097″ as the 2016 Flash Fiction Contest winner.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has previously appeared in Ohio Edit, Juked, Matchbook, and Tammy, among other places. She earned her MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and she’s currently a reader for the Portland Review.

This year’s finalists are Thomas Duncan, Melissa Goode, Jillian Jackson, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Meghan Phillips, and Tessa Yang. Here’s what Leesa had to say about Kate Garklavs’s winning story:

The language of this story is surprising and so, so pretty. ‘piquant as the night breeze to ocean-damp skin’ and ‘the copier’s light shuttled back and forth beneath the lowered lid, gold spilling out in warm flashes.’ ‘My heartbeat slowed to match the thrum, click, return of the copier.’ I loved reading this story, but even more than that, I loved rereading this story. It’s funny and sweet and pretty much everything I look for in my flash fiction. Nostalgia and romance, a bit of ridiculousness, a whole lot of heart.”

—Leesa Cross-Smith, contest judge and author of Every Kiss a War

Kate’s winning piece will be published on The Conium Review Online Compendium, and it will be made into a limited-run micro-chapbook for distribution at the 2017 AWP Conference in Washington, DC. She will receive a $300 prize and a copy of the judge’s latest book.

There were tons of amazing submissions, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll send us next year. The general submission queue opens on January 1st. Additionally, we’ll be announcing the 2017 Flash Fiction Contest judge shortly. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed about these calls for submissions and news from The Conium Review and Conium Press.

Say hello to the “new” Conium Review

The website update and redesign is complete!  There will still be a few broken links and half-finished pages for a while, but it’s mostly done.

The new look is more than skin deep.  The Conium Review is undergoing a lot of exciting changes.  Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere.  We’re growing.  It’s a good thing.

So let’s talk publications.  Moving forward, we’re a “fiction-only” publication.

With the new website, we’ll begin publishing flash fiction online!  On August 1st, 2014 we begin considering submissions of 1,000 words or fewer for The Conium Review Online Compendium.  This new branch of our publication will be like a superhero (or supervillain) version of our blog.  It’ll still include updates and book reviews, but we’ll also begin posting and sharing fiction.  Our website gets nearly ten thousand visitors each month — we can’t ignore the online audience forever.

But of course, we’re still doing a print edition.  The Conium Review journal was initially conceived as a print-based publication, and we’re recommitting  to that vision in a big way.  Rather than doing two issues each year, we’re doing two unique versions of a single annual issue.  There will be a standard paperback and a “collector’s edition” of the journal.  We’ll share more details later, but the collector’s edition will be something that puts trade paperbacks to shame.  Trust us, if you order a collector’s edition, it’ll be the coolest book you own.

More details will come later, so stay tuned.