Cara Blue Adams wins William Peden Prize

Cara Blue Adams’s short story “The Sea Latch” was selected as the winner of The Missouri Review’s William Peden Prize, the annual $1,000 award for the best short story published in the literary magazine.

Adams, an assistant professor of creative writing at Coastal Carolina University, has had her stories and essays published in journals such as Narrative, Epoch, Mississippi Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and The Sun, among many others. She has been awarded The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, along with scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Writer Jessica Francis Kane was the judge. She is a published novelist with a new short story collection, “This Close,” published last year by Graywolf Press.

Adams is a former co-editor of The Southern Review, best known for her essays and short stories. She earned a bachelor's degree from Smith College and an MFA from the University of Arizona, where she also taught creative writing.

Here’s an excerpt from Adams’ prize-winning story:

When I thought of the girl Agnes’s ex-boyfriend Mike had gotten pregnant, a girl who lived in a trailer with her mother and the baby and who could easily be my sister, I thought of weedy grass, the scrubby, dried-out kind that grows on hard-packed soil. I wanted not to be the person my mother and Agnes thought I was: a person who would judge her for her decision, think she was stupid and backward. But at the same time, I wanted to shake her. How could I not, when I remembered her at five years old, trudging after me up the hill on the way to the school bus in her red rain boots, struggling to keep up?