BC English professor finalist for fiction prize

Brazosport College professor Joy Kennedy-O’Neill is one of seven finalists for the Lascaux Prize in Flash Fiction.

The finalists were selected from among more than 1,000 entries. Her winning story, “Pushing a Prayer,” will be published in the Lascaux Review.

Flash fiction is defined as a fictional work of extreme brevity — fewer than 2,000 words — that still provides character and plot development.

Kennedy-O’Neill is also the winner of the 2018 Gris-Gris Flash Fiction Prize, which was judged by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler. She received $500 and her story, “Heron Girl,” will be published in the Winter 2019 issue of Gris-Gris: An Online Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts.

Butler is teaching Kennedy O’Neill’s winning story to his advanced undergraduate class at Florida State University. He described it is “brilliantly pitch-perfect” and “what a literary story can be.”

It’s been a busy year for Kennedy-O’Neill. She has a story in the Cimarron Review, a literary journal established in 1967. She also has stories upcoming in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Phantom Drift Magazine and Abyss.

Kennedy-O’Neill teaches English for Brazosport College.