Last week, I was nominated for my first-ever literary prize!
The Pushcart Prize is one of the older literary prizes in America, and it’s reserved for small presses, publishers, magazines, and journals. Nominations can be short stories, essays, creative nonfiction, or poetry. Each nominating entity can make up to six nominations.
And Madville Publishing decided to nominate “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” from Hurricane Baby: Stories as one of their nominations. This particular short story follows Tommy Hebert of Metairie, Louisiana throughout the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. Tommy had spent the day before and part of the night out on his airboat rescuing people and moving them to higher and drier ground as a volunteer–his trade was fixing cars. He gets up the next day and gets an alert for someone who needs help in Mandeville. So he texts his buddy, who drives an ambulance for a Metairie hospital, and they go and meet up on their boats at Fountainebleu State Park. Then they’re taken with some other men with their saws to the rescue site.
Under the broken-down house are a young woman and her baby boy buried under the rubble of roof. They uncover them and take the baby Avery to the hospital, but Amy Thompson, the young woman, has had her legs crushed under a beam the men can’t move. The EMT gives her a shot to settle her down, then says that there’s nothing else to be done. Afterwards, Tommy and his buddy go eat, but something inside Tommy wants more. He winds up picking up a sixpack of beer for his buddy as a gift for after he helps clean Tommy’s place but alone in his house waiting on him to show back up, he starts drinking them himself to drown out the girl’s screams in his ears.
So I am just pleased s punch that my publisher saw fit to enter me into this contest, along with fellow Madville poets and authors. No idea when prizes are awarded, but it an honor to be nominated, and I don’t take that lightly.
Julie Liddell Whitehead 