{"title":"Kenneth Patchen Award Winners and Submission Information","description":"\u003cdiv data-mce-fragment=\"1\" style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003eAfter a hiatus, THE KENNETH PATCHEN AWARD was revived in 2012. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2012, the Award was reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and it honors the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv data-mce-fragment=\"1\" style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv data-mce-fragment=\"1\" style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003eCurrent award details and submission information are at \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eour Kenneth Patchen Award hub\u003c\/a\u003e.l.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv data-mce-fragment=\"1\" style=\"text-align: left;\"\u003e\n\u003cbr data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eKENNETH PATCHEN is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eSleepers Awake\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem data-mce-fragment=\"1\"\u003eThe Journal of Albion Moonlight\u003c\/em\u003e, have long been benchmarks for beats, postmodernists and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers to greater significance and innovation in their own work.\u003c\/div\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"oppression-for-the-heaven-of-it","title":"Oppression for the Heaven of It","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOppression for the Heaven of It\u003c\/em\u003e is a dialogue-driven novel about a son and a mother. The novel is drawn from the author's experience as the mother of a painter who lived his adult life with paranoid schizophrenia and died in 2015. Proceeds from the book are donated to the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe protagonist is Moonway, an orphan in conversation with the mother who is also the novel's named writer. The structure is the conversation itself: the book runs as sustained exchange, the form of two people trying to reach each other across an exile that neither has agreed to.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2013 Patchen judge, Harold Jaffe, named first what is rarest about the book: that it addresses schizophrenia from the subject position, not the observer's, and addresses it frankly. \u003cem\u003eOppression for the Heaven of It\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2013 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the rarity of that subject-position address and for the frankness with which the conversation form holds it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Moore Bowen","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350595289245,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/oppression-for-the-heaven-of-it.png?v=1641450637"},{"product_id":"how-to-break-article-noun","title":"How to Break Article Noun","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHow to Break Article Noun\u003c\/em\u003e is a carefully crafted work consisting of seven parts, with seven chapters each, intricately interwoven to make up for the absence of a plot. The 2012 Patchen judge, Yuriy Tarnawsky, put it this way: \u003cem\u003eYou can break many things, especially the fragile ones, but also feelings and concepts. In her novel Carolyn Chun touches on the subject of breaking the former two, a bottle and a glass fish, but even though she doesn't say it openly, the book is really about the latter: breaking a person's heart and the traditional form of the novel.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eI didn't want to have a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with the world. I didn't want to write a love story until I found life to be an abiding romance with words,\u003c\/em\u003e Chun tells the reader in the two-sentence Introduction. The first line, \u003cem\u003eCan you close the door and sit down? Something bad,\u003c\/em\u003e recurs throughout like a sequence in a Resnais film. The novel brings together pictures, physics formulas, botanical Latin, poetry, and an embedded essay, documenting a precisely rendered case study of two people growing apart.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eHow to Break Article Noun\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2012 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, the first novel published under JEF's revived prize. It was chosen for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written, and for an insightful and precisely rendered depiction of a crisis in the life of two human beings.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Carolyn Chun","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596403357,"sku":null,"price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/how-to-break-article-noun.png?v=1641450553"},{"product_id":"between-the-legs","title":"Between the Legs","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eBetween the Legs\u003c\/em\u003e is the novel that won the 2015 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel. The novel moves geographically: a couple travels from the Buchenwald concentration camp through Weimar, Prague, Vienna, and Lucerne to a Zen retreat in the Swiss Alps, carrying grief, addiction, and sexual obsession the whole way, with Freud and Kafka standing behind the prose. The award judge that year, James Chapman, chose it \"over many other worthy candidates for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written as well as for its deep sympathy for the human condition.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kate Horsley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350596632733,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/between-the-legs.png?v=1641450583"},{"product_id":"return-to-circa-96","title":"Return to Circa '96","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eReturn to Circa '96\u003c\/em\u003e is built like the institution it is about: its chapters are ordered by Dewey Decimal. The premise is a single year in the life of a small-town public library meeting the World Wide Web for the first time, narrated by Jeremiah D. Angelo, editor of the library's \"riverrun\" newsletter. The novel embeds two sixteen-page mock issues of that newsletter inside its own pages.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe manuscript took First Place in the Novel category of the 2005 Utah Original Writing Competition in its earlier \"Circa: 96\" form, then a decade later won the \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel\u003c\/a\u003e, which brought it to JEF.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bob Sawatzki","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350598467741,"sku":null,"price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/return-to-circa-96.png?v=1641450534"},{"product_id":"mouth","title":"Mouth","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMouth\u003c\/em\u003e is Charles Hood's novel, illustrated throughout by Christine Mugnolo, and the only work of fiction Hood has published. The premise is small and unstable: two lovers at the entrance to a fragile relationship, and the dreams and nightmares that connect them.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt won the 2016 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, a recognition the press extends as much to Mugnolo's illustrations as to Hood's prose: image and sentence holding the two-person fragility together across the length of the book.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Charles Hood","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600695965,"sku":null,"price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/mouth-jef.png?v=1624835049"},{"product_id":"the-skrat-prize-memorial-anthology","title":"The Skrat Prize Memorial Anthology","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Skrat Prize Memorial Anthology\u003c\/em\u003e is R. M. Strauss's debut and the 2017 winner of the \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel. It remains his only book in print.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIts narrator is Dr. Michael H. J. Tizard, an embittered editor who, late in life, assembles the anthology of the title out of extracts from five novels under his control, bending their separate voices toward his own motive. What looks like a curated collection is in fact one editor's macabre legacy, and the seams between the borrowed texts are where the book does its work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe novelist Dominic Ward, blurbing it, wrote that he did not so much read it as move with it. The 2017 Patchen jury chose it for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written, and for the deep sympathy for the human condition both qualities carry, qualities the prize names for Patchen himself.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"R. M. Strauss","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350600990877,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/the-skrat-prize-memorial-anthology.png?v=1624835891"},{"product_id":"those-brave-as-the-skate-is","title":"Those Brave As the Skate Is","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThose Brave As the Skate Is\u003c\/em\u003e is two books in one binding: an innovative novel followed by a separately demarcated manifesto on Pescetarealism, the aesthetic program Patrick Keller coined in 2010. The novel does not gesture toward the manifesto; the manifesto answers for the novel, on the page, immediately after.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eKeller frames Pescetarealism as an extension of Raymond Federman and Ronald Sukenick's egalitarian surfiction, tilted away from performance, the showy virtuoso side, toward persistence, the long ordinary practice of writing. That argument is not incidental to the fiction; it is bolted to its back.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2018 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e judge, the novelist Jønathan Lyons, called it \u003cem\u003e\"a visionary work, one that challenges form and content, destroying both to recreate them in its own vision. Patrick Keller's breadth of vision is simply astonishing.\"\u003c\/em\u003e The prize recognized the way the novel and the manifesto hold together as one argument about form-making.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Patrick Keller","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39350601646237,"sku":"","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/those-brave-as-the-skate-is.png?v=1624835904"},{"product_id":"plague-city","title":"Plague City","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePlague City\u003c\/em\u003e, Genelle Chaconas's first novel, won the 2019 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe book is a William S. Burroughs-style cut-up that reads as much like poetry as fiction. It asks the reader to fill in missing pieces and complete strange \"tests,\" a structure that keeps the reader assembling the text rather than receiving it. The cover is Chaconas's own collage and assembled mixed-media work, and the visual register outside matches the cutting and reassembly going on inside.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe 2019 Patchen judge, Jane L. Carman, read it as \u003cem\u003ea collage-style work that asks the reader to return, reread, and reconsider fiction (and reality)\u003c\/em\u003e, prose that \u003cem\u003esometimes reads like a song, sometimes asks questions\u003c\/em\u003e, and that \u003cem\u003eshows you how literature might (must!) move forward in a chaotic world.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Genelle Chaconas","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40342437593245,"sku":"","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/products\/plague-city.png?v=1625196963"},{"product_id":"own-little-worlds","title":"Own Little Worlds","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOwn Little Worlds\u003c\/em\u003e is a political dark comedy set in post-Trump America. A bomb destroys a Japanese cargo ship in the port of Jacksonville four days before a presidential election, and a retired editor and a laid-off reporter follow the conspiracy from there.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAbout two-thirds of the way in, the novel stops being a novel and becomes a play, then turns back. The play section gathers the full cast onto one stage; the prose then absorbs the gathering and continues. The publisher's own back-cover line frames the book as a shape-shifter and signs off with the tagline \"a tragedy you can dance to.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOwn Little Worlds\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2020 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the pacing and voice that hold a political comedy together across a structural shift the book itself names, and for the rare success of a comic novel that is also a tragedy.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Cal Massey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42145436369053,"sku":null,"price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/THISISTHECOVERfrontwithborder.png?v=1744374332"},{"product_id":"a-is-for-everyone","title":"A is for Everyone","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Is for Everyone\u003c\/em\u003e subverts the children's-alphabet-book format. Every letter routes back to \"A,\" and inside that frame Dennis Vanderspek layers surreal parables, anthropomorphic fables, prose-poem meditations, and deadpan comedy: a sequence of short pieces that read together as a single form rather than a glossary.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePell's citation reads it as Edson-like: plainspoken prose poems whose internal logic skews.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Is for Everyone\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2021 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, recognized for the originality of its form and the plainspoken precision of its language.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dennis Vanderspek","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43540573552797,"sku":"","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/FrontCoverwebsitesmall.png?v=1744373573"},{"product_id":"patchen-award-entry-fee","title":"Patchen Award Entry Fee","description":"The entry fee for the Patchen Award is $25. It can be paid here. If you need to use an alternate form of payment, please email us at egerdes@experimentalfiction.com for other options.","brand":"The Journal of Experimental Fiction","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43703800889501,"sku":"","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/PatchenAwardLogo.png?v=1744373590"},{"product_id":"the-makings-of-a-nobd","title":"The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Makings of a Nobody\u003c\/em\u003e is the novel that won Ann Z. Leventhal the 2022 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel. Leventhal calls the form a fictmoir, a memoir-fiction crossover, and the book traces the life of an ordinary New York Jewish woman across marriage to a lawyer, four children, illness, a love affair, loss, and survival. The method underneath it is journalistic: Leventhal frames her fiction around the four questions a reporter asks, Who, Where, What, and Why, and the fictmoir is what happens when that habit of reporting turns on a life rather than a story.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eJEF Books assistant editor Penelope Gerdes, in her encomium for the novel, wrote: \u003cem\u003eWhen I sat to read\u003c\/em\u003e The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir, \u003cem\u003eI wasn't certain what exactly I was looking for. Innovative work can quite often follow similar trends; oddly enough, they can be grouped in similarities by exactly how they innovate. Yet this work is inexhaustible. To understand its complexities, to see how well the writer understands the craft, how brilliantly she builds this space of language and structure, requires not just a dip but a dive, a delve. For one cannot reach the bottom. There is innovation from the first sentence to the last.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Ann Z. Leventhal","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43804409823389,"sku":"","price":15.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/FrontCoverwebsitesmall_d0a5433c-8692-4ccc-acdf-92f8b2d005dc.png?v=1744373610"},{"product_id":"out-of-competition","title":"Out of Competition","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOut of Competition\u003c\/em\u003e is a comedy set inside a film festival that is itself out of competition.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe setting is a thinly veiled Cannes on the French Riviera. A failing Hollywood producer moves through democracy demonstrators, a kidnapping, and the festival deputy's quiet coup against his boss, while a Russian impresario's promotional shark falls from a helicopter into the bay. People who should win do not; people who should not, do. The dialogue runs in English and French as the cast does, and the novel keeps the tempo of a festival week, all scheduling and accident and competing publicity machines.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eOut of Competition\u003c\/em\u003e won the 2023 \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/pages\/patchen\"\u003eKenneth Patchen Award\u003c\/a\u003e for the Innovative Novel, recognized for a comic-novel structure that takes the international film festival as a working political stage and lets the form do the satire that the dialogue would otherwise have to spell out.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lew Collins","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44908996329629,"sku":"","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/Front_Cover_Collins_95fa02e5-f390-4edf-b938-b8164f0b0d7a.png?v=1745441857"},{"product_id":"red-girl-jumping-an-experimental-memoir-written-by-memory","title":"Red Girl Jumping: an experimental memoir written by memory","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAVAILABLE FOR PREORDERING! \u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eDue January 27, 2026!\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eRED GIRL JUMPING is a fable-like memoir by Kim Merrill, a New York playwright. It is the story of Kimberly, a grown woman, and Red Girl, a shard of memory trapped in her mind, who is also the narrator of this spellbinding story of dissociation and healing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs Red Girl tells it, her job is to protect Kimberly from her secret of childhood incest. She does so with mission-like zeal until Kimberly reaches her thirties. Then-to her shame-Red Girl unleashes a torrent that upends Kimberly's life. When Kimberly is fifty, tired of her pain, she hauls her diaries up a hill to set them all on fire. Red Girl turns herself to ash and tries to fly away-but where can memory go?\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAshy Red Girl falls from the sky and re-enters Kimberly's brain. Longing for Kimberly's love, she hatches a plan to give them peace: \"Write how we split in two! Un-fear the invisible heart!\" Kimberly hands it to Red Girl: \"You're the one to write this.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCommitting to the task, Red Girl summons the occupants of Kimberly's dungeon mind - including the Laughing Corpse, a hero made of bones who wants to silence them all. In a voice straddling humor and desperation, she writes of splitting from Kimberly, of un-forgetting, of losing family, and generates a life-and-death struggle between her loyalty to the Laughing Corpse and the pull of Kimberly's need to be a unified self.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kim Merrill","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47519234130077,"sku":null,"price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/files\/CoverVersion8.png?v=1767044479"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0537\/8480\/5533\/collections\/Kenneth-Patchen-Award-Logo.jpg?v=1641742327","url":"https:\/\/www.experimentalfiction.com\/collections\/kenneth-patchen-award-winners\/memoir.oembed","provider":"The Journal of Experimental Fiction","version":"1.0","type":"link"}