Uncategorized | September 28, 2016

The countdown to the October 1 deadline for the 26th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize is on! There are just a few days left to enter for your chance at our three $5,000 prizes.

During the past few weeks, we’ve featured the three winners of last year’s Editors’ Prize, Genese Grill (creative nonfiction), Phillip B. Williams (poetry), and, today, Emma Törzs (fiction).

Emma says, “Winning the Editors’ Prize made me rich in both dollars and dignity. I had never ‘been flown’ anywhere before, much less attended a literary party in my honor, and in a solitary writer’s life full of invisible striving (and visible waitressing), such trappings of legitimacy really do help me keep the faith in myself and my work. I am very grateful to the other winners and to the staff of the Missouri Review for showing me a good time, and for encouraging me to spend a small portion of my winnings not on rent but on a pair of truly unnecessary red suede platform shoes.”

Watch Emma Törzs read her prize-winning story, “The Wall”:

Emma shows off her outstanding boots with help from creative nonfiction winner Genese Grill at last year’s reading and reception

Emma Törzs is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her fiction has been honored with a 2015 O. Henry Prize and a 2015 Minnesota Emerging Writers’ grant and has been published in journals such as Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Narrative, Cincinnati Review, and Salt Hill. She received her MFA in fiction in 2012 from the University of Montana