Another Season of Winners by Susan Shafarzek

We’re happy to announce the 2024 Streetlight Essay/Memoir contest winners. With an emphasis on memoir, the winners are as follows:

First Prize winner, Sandra Hopkins, in her essay, “Tongues of Fire,” gives us a deep glance into a childhood lived actively. In a piece that is both touching and amusing, she shows how the relationship between generations can be both complicated and beautiful. An artist, born and raised in Virginia, this author shows a fine awareness of the telling evidence of personhood

Second Prize goes to Jeanne Malmgren for “Blindsided,” a precisely written story about an incident at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Besides being an experience we can perhaps all relate to in one way or another, this essay is admirably personal and evocative of the struggle to deal with a world that has trouble accommodating difference.Jeanne Malmgre writes to us from South Carolina, where she is both a published writer and a psychotherapist.

Third Prize winner, Avery Roche, takes us into the personal experience of a horrendous accident. In this piece, which will be the first chapter of a new memoir, she leads with a remembrance of pain and it aftermath. It is a story of relationship, chance and hopefulness.

Congratulations to these talented winners!