Cecilia Woloch, author of a novel and six books of poetry, has been named winner of the Prairie Schooner’s Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest for her essay, “Skin.”

The essay was selected by Dunya Mikhail, guest judge. Of the winning essay, Mikhail said: “The mixture of wound and wonder extends beyond the writing’s vocabulary to reach a particular moment of transformation. It reminds us of Chuang Tzu’s words ‘Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, it became a butterfly.’”

Woloch will receive a $500 prize and “Skin” will appear in the spring 2022 issue of Prairie Schooner.

Woloch is currently a Fulbright fellow at the University of Rzeszów in southeastern Poland. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky. She is one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic.

Lauren Watel’s essay “Hunger” received an honorable mention, and the essay will appear in the summer 2022 issue of the Schooner.

Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and came to the United States in 1996. The author of award-winning poetry books, her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, a Knights Foundation grant, a Kresge Fellowship, and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.

Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Department of English and the University of Nebraska Press.