Nicole Baute is the winner of the 2018 Pinch Literary Award for her fiction story “You Will Be Extraordinary.” She grew up in Southwestern Ontario and has lived in many places including Toronto, Vancouver, and New Delhi, India. Her short stories and essays have been published by Joyland, River Teeth, carte blanche, Cleaver, and Wigleaf, and she placed third in the Mythic Picnic Fiction Prize. Nicole teaches creative writing online as part of Sarah Selecky Writing School and is pursuing her MFA at the University of British Columbia. e

Jennifer Givhan, a Mexican-American poet and novelist, has earned an NEA and a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship. Her books include Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series), Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize), Rosa’s Einstein (2019 Camino Del Sol Poetry Series), and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing). Her honors include the Frost Place Latinx Scholarship, a National Latinx Writers’ Conference Scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Poetry Prize 2nd place, and fifteen Pushcart nominations. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. She lives near the Sleeping Sister volcanoes in New Mexico with her family, and can be found discussing feminist motherhood at jennifergivhan.com, Facebook, & Twitter @JennGivhan.  We recently sat down with her to discuss her writing habits:

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War (YesYes Books 2020), which won the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in Guernica, Pleiades, Passages North, 32 Poems, Cherry Tree, and Blackbird, among others. She is a recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, as well as the winner of The Pinch’s 2017 Literary Award in Poetry. She grew up in a small town in central Alabama and currently lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

Marina Petrova’s stories have appeared in The Conium Review, Catapult, and the Empty Mirror. Her writing also has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, LARB, the Late Night Library, and Sugared Water. She holds an MFA from The New School and received fellowship from The MacDowell Colony and from The Mineral School. Although she did not place in the 2018 Pinch Literary Awards, her fiction story “Monkey” was still selected for publication in issue 38.2 of The Pinch due to the quality of the piece.

After last week’s conversation with current Pinch Literary Awards nonfiction judge Elissa Washuta, The Pinch staff decided to reach out to past contestant Sarah Viren. Sarah was the nonfiction winner of The 2014 Pinch Literary Awards with her Nonfiction essay “My Murderer’s Futon” which was featured in The Pinch 35.1.