We're excited to announce that Emma Miao, a poet from Vancouver, BC, is the winner of the 2020 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize! Her poem “Rabbits on the Balcony” will appear in the Spring 2021 issue of The Fiddlehead. Born in 2004, she was commended in the 2019 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, won the 2021 Frog Hollow Press Chapbook Contest, and has been published in numerous literary journals. Check out editorial assistant Eliza Ives' interview with Emma about her prize-winning poem!

Thank you again to our judges Canisia Lubrin, Jenna Albert and Adèle Barclay and to all who entered the poetry contest! 

The Fiddlehead is excited to announce our 2021 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest shortlist! The contest was judged by Jenna Lyn Albert, Adèle Barclay, and Canisia Lubrin. The winner of the $2000 contest prize will be announced in early April 2021 and the winning story will be featured in the Spring 2021 issue. Thank you to all who entered and congratulations to the following fifteen finalists!

Music recommendation from author Dustin Hoffman. 

Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize) and No Good for Digging (Word West Press). He painted houses for ten years in Michigan and now teaches creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina. Hoffman's short fiction A Sky So Sharp was published in issue no. 285 of The Fiddlehead. 

The Fiddlehead's 2021 Creative Nonfiction contest is now open and we're excited to announce that Chelene Knight will be judging this year's submissions! 

Kate Cayley is a fiction writer, playwright, and poet who's work has been featured in many issues of The Fiddlehead. She has written a short story collection, How You Were Born, two collections of poetry, When This World Comes to an End and Other Houses, a young adult novel, The Hangman in the Mirror, and a number of plays. She has won the Trillium Book Award, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, an O. Henry Short Story Prize, and a Chalmers Fellowship, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the K. M. Hunter Award, and the Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize and the CBC Prize in both poetry and fiction. 

Eleonore Schönmaier’s poetry has been published by The Fiddlehead many times, most recently in our 2020 Summer Poetry Issue. Her Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete is forthcoming in 2021 (MQUP). Her critically acclaimed Wavelengths of Your Song (MQUP) was published in German translation in 2020. In 2019 she won the National Broadsheet Contest. Her poetry has been widely anthologized including in Best Canadian Poetry. Find out more at eleonoreschonmaier.com!

We're excited to welcome Rowan McCandless as our new Creative Nonfiction Editor here at The Fiddlehead! 

We're excited to announce that Elise Thorburn is the winner of our 2020 Fiction Contest and $2000 prize! Her story Rubens' Salmon is featured in our Winter issue no. 286, which is available now! 

Elise Thorburn has a Ph.D. in media and technology studies. She has published in academic journals, and wrote, co-produced and hosted a podcast on the history of electronic monitoring. She is an avid reader, a medical student and a prison abolitionist. This is her first published work of fiction.

Thank you to all who entered the fiction contest and congratulations to the fourteen finalists. And thanks again to our judge Shashi Bhat!

"I often asked famous writers for addresses with the hope of obtaining work for The Fiddlehead; almost no one ever responded to my emails later, but Marvin replied with genuine enthusiasm, and so began a longtime relationship with the magazine."

Retired Editor Ross Leckie remembers Marvin Bell.