Kathy Fish
From the official announcement, which you can read in its entirety at http://www.smokelong.com/kathy-fish-fellowship/
SmokeLong Quarterly will accept submissions July 15 through September 15, 2016, for its 2017 Kathy Fish Fellowship for new and emerging writers. The fellowship honors Kathy Fish, a former editor here at SmokeLong, a fantastic writer and a continuing champion of new and emerging writers.
The winner of the 2017 Kathy Fish Fellowship will be considered a “writer-in-residence” at SmokeLong (note: position is virtual) for four quarterly issues (March, June, September, and December 2017). Each issue will include one flash by the Fellowship winner.
The winner of the Fellowship will also receive $500.00, to be paid as follows: $100.00 on announcement of the winner, and $100.00 upon publication of each of the four issues in 2017.
Fellows will have the opportunity to work with SmokeLong staff and participate in online writing workshops.
All writers previously unpublished in SmokeLong Quarterly and who do not have a published chapbook or book-length work in any genre (or are not under contract for such) are eligible to apply.
I’m so glad this has continued (after a hiatus of a few years). We first introduced this when I was still running the day-to-day operations. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
It seems that many awards in people’s names are established posthumously. We’re ecstatic that we can recognize Kathy Fish while she’s still very much alive and kicking. As she steps down as our Fiction Editor, we at SmokeLong want to recognize Kathy’s enormous contributions to the magazine and to the writing community as a whole. In particular, Kathy has always been a great champion of new writers and has exhibited an uncanny talent for finding previously unpublished writers whose work just shines.
We want to foster that sort of commitment to new writers, and in that vein, we’re creating the Kathy Fish Fellowship.
This is seriously an excellent opportunity. Previous winners have seen their publication credits soar. And when I stepped down from leading SmokeLong on a day-to-day basis, two of the first three winners of the award, Tara Laskowski and Beth Thomas, took over my duties. Tara continues in that role, and is the longest running person in that position in the history of the magazine.