All submissions to Tributaries are automatically entered in our annual contest! Every year, a famously talented guest judge chooses one winner and one runner-up in each genre: Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, and Visual Arts.

Winners receive a cash prize and certificate, not to mention bragging rights, gushy praise, and boundless admiration from staff and peers alike. But no pie. Not yet, anyway.

Winners of the Tributaries 2023 Contests for Best Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Visual Arts

Poetry

Winner: “Here”—Gregg Sells

Second Place: “The Problem with Funeral Plants”—Kim Kile

Creative Nonfiction

Winner: “Rural Indiana”—Deena Monnett

Second Place: “Hockey Practice”—Scott Wade

Visual Arts

Winner: “ROYGBIV Octopus”— Julia Jackson

Second Place: “Perseverance”—Mary Hannah

Judges

For Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction:

MATT BURRIESCI is the author of Nonprofit, which won the AWP Award in the Novel, and Dead White Guys: A Father, His Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World, which has been translated into multiple languages. Since 2015, he has served as the Executive Director of the Providence Athenaeum. From 1999–2011 he served in various capacities at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, including Executive Director. He has also served as Executive Director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

For Visual Arts:

PAUL XAVIER RUTZ is a painter and installation artist based in Portland, Oregon. In 2011, he earned a doctorate in Theory and Cultural Studies from Purdue University with a dissertation on combat art from the Iraq War. His installation “Into a Study,” a collaboration with neuroscientists from Michigan State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Brooklyn College, has broken new ground using a hybrid art-science approach and state-of-the-art technology to study how people with different backgrounds view artworks and how their bodies react in a gallery setting. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Oregon Military Museum and Purdue University, as well as group shows at Figure Ground Gallery in Seattle and the Smithsonian Institute. He has contributed to HuffPost, The Smart Set, and Cincinnati Review, among others, and he is a feature writer for Military History and Vietnam magazines.