2008 Page Edwards Short Fiction Contest

Winners

Sohrab Fracis, the final-round short story judge of the Florida First Coast Writers’ Festival, has selected the winners of the 2008 contest.

Winners' Bios

"Short-Timers" by Tom Glenn
Tom Glenn was born into a California version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald world of soirées, days at the races, and upscale cocktail lounges. When he was four, his older sister died bringing together his estranged parents. At six, he realized that he would have to take care of himself—his alcoholic mother and playboy father were otherwise engaged. At the same time, he discovered both writing and language and taught himself French and Italian. Six years later, the imprisonment of his lawyer father for embezzlement left the family impoverished. His high school days were spent in Oakland’s ghettos where he raised money with a paper route and a job as delivery boy. He got through college (majoring in drama and music and adding German to his languages) by working as everything from a dishwasher and service station clerk to a barista in an Italian-speaking coffee shop.

Upon graduation from the University of California (Berkeley), he enlisted in the army to study Chinese but was sent for a year to study Vietnamese—a chance event that reshaped his life. For the next twenty-five years, Vietnam was the focus of his attention. After he left the army, he worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Embassy in Saigon, spending the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam during the war. He was evacuated under fire during the fall of Saigon in 1975. In subsequent years of working for the government, he became an expert first on Korea, later on China (he had been studying Chinese, first in night classes at Georgetown, later in Vietnam). As he moved into the executive ranks, he published more than twenty articles on management and leadership and took a doctorate from the George Washington University in Public Administration. Meanwhile, he married and fathered four delightful children.

In 1984, he volunteered to care for AIDS patients, in the nineties worked with the homeless and, beginning in 2001, administered to the dying in the hospice program. Meanwhile, he began studying Spanish and volunteered to work with immigrants.

Through it all, he wrote. All his writing is haunted by AIDS and the hospice experience. Vietnam looms large in his stories, and nearly everything in his work is, in one way or another, about fathers and children. His stories have appeared in many publications and won numerous prizes, but for the last several years, he has concentrated on novels, none so far in print.

"A Face in a Movie" by Rick Maloy
Raised in New York City, Rick spent most of his working and family raising years in nearby New Jersey. After running the family’s insurance brokerage business for a number of years, he turned it over to his son in 2004 and migrated south with his wife of 40 years, Ann Marie. They currently reside in Ponte Vedra Beach, where Rick divides his time between writing short stories, playing golf and traveling, particularly to see their children and grandchildren in the New York area.

"Congress of Shadows" by Clark Case
Clark Case lives and writes in Lexington, Kentucky.  He writes fiction, at once because he can think of no better way to pass quiet evenings, and because it’s easy to conceal such endeavors while looking like one is drafting pleadings in a law office.  No clients were billed for this story.

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