Announcing the Winner of the Dzanc short story collection prize
Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2023 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize: Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds by Christian Moody. In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2025, the prize also comes with a $2,500 advance.
“Christian Moody's Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds was full of surprises. Like so many of us, Moody’s characters are simply looking for connection, but doing so in these almost speculative, larger-than-life scenarios: an elaborate game of hide and seek, trees that see their surroundings and those who enter, and a babycatcher right out of a Cormac McCarthy or William Gay novel. Wild and exciting as these stories are, it’s the characters’ humanity that brings them full circle,” said Dan Wickett, Dzanc’s co-founder and founder of the Emerging Writers Network.
Widely varied in type and theme, several of the stories in Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds have been published in Best American Fantasy, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best New American Voices.
Christian Moody holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and a PhD in English from the University of Cincinnati. He has been in residence at the Yaddo artist colony and has attended the Sewanee and Bread Loaf conferences. Along with being a Creative Arts Renewal Fellow by the Arts Council of Indianapolis, he has also received awards and fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, the Charles Taft Center for the Humanities, and many others.
“For me, feeling is what fiction is all about. I’m thrilled to have won the Short Story Collection Prize, and I’m utterly grateful to Dzanc Books for championing this book and helping it find readers,” Moody said. “I love stories that are so delightfully weird and strange that you can’t look away, which gives the characters time to sneak up on you with deep feelings that break your heart. While the settings in Lost in the Forest of Mechanical Birds are an eclectic journey through creepy Gothic forests, sci-fi dystopias, dark fairytale woods, and massive games of competitive hide-and-go-seek, what I hope holds the stories together are the real feelings at the core: these characters experience tests of friendship and family, love lost and gained, and they have to cope with life’s inevitable sadnesses and disappointments—just like we all do. Dzanc has a long, gorgeous list of daring writers–from Laura van den Berg to Stephen Graham Jones—and I’m delighted to be among them.”
The Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing. Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization not only committed to producing quality literary works but providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors. Dzanc Books also runs annual prizes for the novel and nonfiction. For more information on the house, upcoming titles, and other prize winners, please visit www.dzancbooks.org.