Award Announcement
Second Annual Camber Press Fiction Chapbook Award Winner Announced

Peekskill, NY, February 20, 2011 — Camber Press is proud to announce the winner of the second annual Camber Press Fiction Chapbook Award. Erica Plouffe Lazure’s entry entitled “Dry Dock” was chosen by Chuck Kinder from among a group of unidentified submissions. Lazure, a resident of Exeter, New Hampshire, sets her story in the fishing town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Gina’s relationship with Joe and their struggle to survive both financially and emotionally is the kind of tight, tough, and moving kind of writing we feel we don’t see enough of from young writers today. This intergenerational tale is the type of fiction which got the editors of Camber Press to love literature many years ago.

Noted author and final judge Chuck Kinder writes of this long story:

“It was a privilege and a pleasure to judge the Camber Press Fiction Award, even under trying personal circumstances. I was mightily impressed by the uniformly high quality of the writing. All of the entries were absolutely first-rate, and my final decision was a difficult one. But one particular story driven by powerful, unforgettable characters who loomed up off of the page into vibrant, vivid life immediately grabbed my attention, and as I kept returning to this story an odd thought occurred to me — what if Hemingway had had a daughter who could write with language as lean and tight and tough as her old man, plus with lines carrying the extra grit and gravel of a Lucinda William’s country blues song? And I began thinking of the story as a story by Hemingway’s long lost daughter whom I pictured as a tough, tattooed biker-chick growling her story in an old roadhouse bar band under blinking blue neon. My best advice is to pour a stiff drink and pound a fistful of silver into the daughter of Hemingway’s jukebox and take in a hard tale full of blues, heartbreak and balls.”

Along with publication Ms. Lazure will receive an award of $1,000 and ten copies of her book. With a scheduled release date of July, this piece of fiction marks our entry into promoting the continually-neglected art form of the long story. The long story can be a quirky reading experience. The length offers itself to be consumed in one sitting and yet the narrative arc is allowed room to play. Our goal was to provide readers a unique tale within untraditional confines. Lazure aptly serves an often overlooked form of American fiction.

Erica Plouffe Lazure is a June 2008 graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She served as the 2009-10 George Bennett writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, where she is now an instructor of English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #29, The Greensboro Review, Meridian, The North Carolina Literary Review, Booth Literary Journal, Keyhole and elsewhere. Her critical paper on William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! was published in Mississippi Quarterly in 2010. Lazure’s short story collection, Cadence and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize in 2008. One of these stories, “The Cold Front,” as selected by C. Michael Curtis in 2008 for the Brenda L. Smart short fiction contest at N.C. State University.

A PDF of the press release is available here.

We wish to thank the writers who took the time and effort to send us their manuscripts for the Camber Press Fiction Chapbook Award.