Return to News

Judge Jennine Capó Crucet Selects the Winner of the First Georgia Review Prose Prize

The Georgia Review congratulates Brian Truong, who was selected by judge Jennine Capó Crucet as the winner of the inaugural Georgia Review Prose Prize. Truong will receive $1,500 for his essay Fake Handbags, which will be published in the Summer 202issue. He will also give a public reading this summer with Crucet.

Of Truongs essay, Crucet wrote:

Fake Handbags lures us into the world of counterfeit name-brand goods and quickly moves us past the superficial to the substantial. It impressed me with its literal and figurative focus on the details—how those very details become a way to judge somethings authenticity or quality—be it a handbag or a fathers rage. Those same details—a misaligned zipper, the spacing between letters in a logo—also become the means by which a mother and her sons grow closer over time. Learning to pay close attention ends up being the way the speaker in this essay navigates not only the vendors on New Yorks Canal Street, but also his relationships with his parents—and specifically his father. In the case of the latter, its how he ultimately survives his fathers violent temper—something the speaker demonstrates as an outgrowth of relentless sacrifice that he feels goes unnoticed. But hes wrong; his son is watching it all, taking it in, and depicting it for us with generosity and deep care. There is nothing at all phony about the heart on display in this captivating and engrossing essay. 

Brian Truong is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has received fellowships and support from Millay Arts, Periplus, Tin House, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. “Fake Handbags” will be his first published essay and is part of his memoir-in-progress about growing up in a family of working-class Vietnamese refugees in Texas. 

Crucets choice for the top fiction entry and the runnerup for the Georgia Review Prose Prize is Ernie Wangs story, Mother, Marksman, which will also appear in our Summer 2023 issue.

As Crucet writes,

From this storys opening lines to its confession soon after that those opening lines arent actually true, the narration in this wonderful story powers through some of lifes thorniest emotions—despair, resentment, fear, rage, disgust—with direct humor and an authority I couldnt resist. And I love stories where a characters job plays such a big part in revealing who they are: on the very first page, we find Yumi wishing that a table of customers at the restaurant where she works had been run over by a dump truck. Her day job contrasts hilariously (and later, tragically) with her evening obsession of playing an online video game—one for which she is not the target audience, to say the least. And all of it is a distraction from what she cannot face: her inability to connect with her grown son and his suffering. Its ultimately a story about how difficult yet necessary it is to show our love to those around us in all the ways we know how, and yet its told in a way that skillfully cloaks that intention until the very end. Mother, Marksmanis a hilarious, surprising, and ultimately very moving short story. 

Ernie Wang is a second-generation Chinese-Japanese-American writer. He grew up on U.S.military bases in Japan. His short fiction appears or will soon appear in Chicago Quarterly Review, McSweeneys, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Story, and elsewhere. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston.

We would also like to thank everyone who submitted to this years contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. For more information about the contest, please visit here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Georgia Review Prose Prize opens in November 2023!

 

PRE-ORDER SUMMER 2023 TODAY!

 

2022 Georgia Review Prose Prize Winner and Finalists

Winner:
Brian Truong, Fake Handbags

RunnerUp:
Ernie Wang, Mother, Marksman

Finalists:
Jung Hae Chae, Good Hair
Olivia Cheng, Confinement
Nicole Haroutunian, Points of Light
Daryl Li, Killing Time
Nathan Roberts, Walking Home
Allegra Solomon, True Blue
L.J. Sysko, Inside Lane
Kosiso Ugwueze, The Wedding