Graduate Student Wins Nonfiction Contest

Prairie Schooner is pleased to announce Heather Johnson as the winner of the 2017 Summer Nonfiction Contest, judged by Esme Weijung Wang, for her essay “Nowhere Place.” Johnson will receive a prize of $250, and her essay will appear in the Spring 2018 edition of Prairie Schooner. Heather Johnson is a Dine woman from the Navajo Nation, currently residing in Albuquerque, New Mexico where she is a second-year MFA in the University of New Mexico’s Creative Writing Program. She is working on a novel while also writing poetry and personal essays. Her work has appeared in Sigma Tau Delta’s Rectangle, Anti-Heroin Chic, and she was a blog contributor to Blue Mesa Review. Her subjects are surviving personal and historical traumas, marginalized identities, reverence for the body and natural world, and the landscape as sacred. She is the mother of a beautiful six-year-old boy and a founding member of the Trigger Warning Writers Group.