Zone 3 is excited to announce the winners of its annual literary awards in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction: Gemini Wahhaj, Juleen Eun Sun Johnson, and Gwendolyn Paradice.
Fiction
Gemini Wahhaj is a Bangladeshi American writer. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Cimarron Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, and Northwest Review, among others. She lives in Houston, where she teaches English at a community college.
Poetry
Juleen Eun Sun Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted and taken to Valdez, Alaska. Johnson is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. She earned an MFA in Visual Studies from PNCA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Johnson’s work has been published in: Cirque: A Literary Journal, Nervous Breakdown, The Rio Grande Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, The Dunes Review, Zone 3, Poetry Northwest and other journals and anthologies.
Johnson was the Editor of Special Projects for Jubilat in Fall 2020-Spring 2021. She is the founder and editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.
Nonfiction
Gwendolyn Paradice is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, identifies as two-spirited, and is hard of hearing. Their first collection of short stories, More Enduring for having Been Broken, won Black Lawrence Press’ 2019 Hudson Prize and was published in early 2021. Their co-authored chapbook, Carnival Bound (or, please unwrap me), was an editor’s choice pick from the Cupboard Pamphlet and was published by the press in late 2019. Gwendolyn’s short fiction and essay can be found in Crab Orchard Review, Booth, Hypertext, Tin House (online), Uncanny Magazine, Craft, and others. They retain an MFA from Bennington College and a PhD from the University of Missouri. They are currently an Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University, and when they’re not teaching, reading, or writing, you can find them playing video games or powerlifting.
The Zone 3 Literary Awards are selected by the editors in each genre from works published in the magazine that year. Congratulations to our winners!
