CONGRATULATIONS to Vickie Fang, Winner of the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction!

Pleiades congratulates Vickie Fang, winner of the 2022 Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction, judged by Trudy Lewis. She will receive an award of $1,000 and her winning story, “Eleven Things I Have Left Now That My Daughter is Gone,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Pleiades.

Of the winning story, Trudy Lewis writes:

“Eleven Things I Have Left Now That My Daughter is Gone” works, like the best of literary realism, to undermine easy assumptions with the weight and texture of lived experience. Examining a daughter’s promise through the lens of a mother’s despair, this story achieves a rare level of emotional intensity, moral complexity, and formal precision.  In a few brief pages, the author traces two generations of blighted mother-daughter relations, exposing the ragged seams of the Cinderella story as it unravels under the strain of poverty, addiction, prostitution, and patriarchy.   

Pleiades would also like to recognize the finalists for the 2022 Kinder/Crump Award:

“The Arrival,” by Sara Mirza

“Flight of the Skylark,” by Dan Reidmiller

“The Implicated,” by Suphil Lee Park 

“The Mirror Gazes Back,” by Shawn Zubin

Pleiades thanks all those who submitted to this year’s award; we are grateful to have had the opportunity to read your work.

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Vickie Fang is a former lawyer who received an MFA from Queens and now writes full time. She is currently finishing a novel set in 8th century China titled The Ghosts of Chang An and is the co-author of a web site translating classical Chinese poetry,  https://www.classicchinesepoetry.com/  “Eleven Things” was inspired by her volunteer work with prostituted women in Baltimore and her admiration for the stoicism, determination, and hopefulness the women so often displayed. It is also somewhat inspired by the joy she’s had in raising two children, Daniel Fang, a drummer with Turnstile, and Lee Fang, an investigative journalist, who both went on to make successful lives for themselves in ways she couldn’t have imagined. Some of Vickie Fang’s other short stories have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Baltimore Literary Review, and Scribble.