About the Author
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Raised in Louisiana on new-wave music, horror films, and Grimm fairy tales; LeeAnn Olivier is a neurodivergent Cajun poet. Her work has recently appeared in The Missouri Review, Bloodletter, Sand Hills, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and teaches English at Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas. As a trauma survivor, Olivier hopes to help her students navigate their own challenges through creative expression.
STEEL TOE BOOKS 2024 BOOK AWARD ANNOUNCEMENT
Steel Toe Books is excited to announce our Steel Toe Books Poetry Award Winner and our Steel Toe Books Prose Award Winner for 2024. The titles will receive publication in Fall 2025. Congratulations to our shortlist and longlist authors, and thank you to all of the authors that submitted to the prize. The 2025 Steel Toe Books Poetry and Prose (fiction and nonfiction) Awards for full-length books opens January 1, 2025 Please congratulate our winners!
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POETRY WINNER
LeeAnn Olivier Chimera
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About Chimera
These Southern-gothic dreamscapes are inspired by fairy tales, myths, music, and the divine feminine. Navigating through traumas such as domestic violence and acute liver failure, the speaker creates a spell book mapping her way out of the Underworld via the forests and swamps of Texas and Louisiana.
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​POETRY SHORTLIST
Shannon Frost Greenstein
David Breeden
Beni Tobin
Béné Kusendila​
POETRY LONGLIST
Olivia Sokolowski
Dale Cottingham
Geri Gale
Ellen Black
Ryan Lugalia-Hollon
Madeline Giberson
George Yatchisin
Linda Scheller
PROSE WINNER
Sara Baker Sacrifice
​About Sacrifice
The stories in this collection acknowledge the isolation of post-modern lives as protagonists grapple with issues of identity and desire, and the sacrifices entailed in pursuing each. For whom or what are we willing to sacrifice? Do we make unconscious sacrifices? Do we make sacrifices we later regret—and what happens then? What is it like to witness someone being sacrificed on the altar of another’s hubris? Is freedom a worthy sacrifice for love? These are some of the questions the stories in this collection seek to explore.
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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​PROSE SHORTLIST
Michelle Donahue
susan mccarty
GG Silverman
Daniel Stolar
Ryan Burden
PROSE LONGLIST
Ayshe Dengtash
Summer Hammond
Mark Wagstaff
Curtis VanDonkelaar
Aimee LaBrie
Marianne Erhardt
Denise Tolan
Ashish Kaul
Adam Peterson
Patricia Schultheis
FROM THE PRESS
The press thanks everyone who submitted to the contest and notes that the work submitted to contest was very strong across the board.
About the Author
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Sara Baker's fiction has been widely published in literary journals, including the Crab Orchard Review, Cleaver, Confrontation, H.O.W. Journal, China Grove, theintima.com, The Examined Life Journal, The New Quarterly, The Lullwater Review. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Fish Short Story Contest.