{"id":4080,"date":"2026-02-04T11:28:39","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T18:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/?p=4080"},"modified":"2026-02-09T13:24:24","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T20:24:24","slug":"mfa-alumnus-wins-horror-novella-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/blog\/2026\/02\/04\/mfa-alumnus-wins-horror-novella-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"MFA Alumnus Wins Horror Novella Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>UNM Creative Writing alumnus and northern New Mexico poet, Victoriano C\u00e1rdenas, was recently announced as the winner of the inaugural <a href=\"https:\/\/www.colorado.edu\/journal\/subito\/SGJ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Stephen Graham Jones Horror Novella Competition<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Presented by Subito Press from the University of Colorado &#8211; Boulder, the competition called for novella manuscripts from 15,000-40,000 words, and announced finalists in late 2025. Stephen Graham Jones, Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and best-selling author of &#8220;The Buffalo Hunter Hunter,&#8221; read the finalists and selected &#8220;Casa de Sue\u00f1os&#8221; as the winner, calling it a &#8220;very cool, creepy novella.&#8221; C\u00e1rdenas was announced as the winner of the competition on New Year&#8217;s Eve 2025.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Cardenas&#8217; manuscript, &#8220;Casa de Sue\u00f1os,&#8221; which is set near and on UNM campus and&nbsp;inspired by both historical and personal events, is a twist on the haunted-house tale, detailing the effects of colonization, buried history, and many iterations of violence upon a particularly cursed plot of land and its many tenants. &#8220;Casa de Sue\u00f1os&#8221; was also selected by Fatimah Asghar as the runner-up for the 2025 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize from Texas Review Press.&nbsp;&#8220;Casa de Sue\u00f1os&#8221; is forthcoming from Subito Press and will be published as a perfect-bound text in 2026.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>C\u00e1rdenas is also the author of &#8220;Portraits as Animal: Poems&#8221; (2023), and writes for Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM. He will furthermore be attending the Ragdale Residency in February-March of this year.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>UNM Creative Writing alumnus and northern New Mexico poet, Victoriano C\u00e1rdenas, was recently announced as the winner of the inaugural Stephen Graham Jones Horror Novella Competition. Presented by Subito Press from the University of Colorado &#8211; Boulder, the competition called for novella manuscripts from 15,000-40,000 words, and announced finalists in late 2025. Stephen Graham Jones, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4088,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4080"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4087,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4080\/revisions\/4087"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}