​Somos en escrito Magazine is proud to announce today, Halloween 2018, the winners of the first annual Extra-Fiction Writing Contest. The contest is open to all aspiring and established escritores to compete for recognition of their talents as writers of extra fiction, works that go beyond the standard notion of fiction to awe, terrify, challenge reality and force us to look around corners before we get there.

We welcome submissions of ex-fi works throughout the year, so new writers, hone your skills. All writers of Latinidad with a bent toward ex-fi, that extra dimension beyond reality, can look to Somos en escrito as the magazine most welcoming of the kind of writing you like, ex-fi with a Latin twist.

To keep everyone involved, we also plan next Halloween to name the best ex-fi work submitted during the year, with two runners-up.

The envelope please:

First Place Winner:
“Fatherly, dragonly, motherly . . . love, luck and touch”
Rudy Ch. García of Denver, Colorado, co-founder of and dedicated contributor to La Bloga, is perhaps best known for his alternate reality/fantasy novel, The Closet of Discarded Dreams, which was a finalist in the International Latino Book Awards’ Fantasy/Sci-Fi category in 2013. He has been a longtime proponent of extra-fiction.

Second Place:
“The Archivist”
Ricardo Tavarez, who hails from Watsonville, California, and now lives in Oakland, has an MFA from San Francisco State. He is part of La Brigada, a collective that organizes the International SF Flor Y Canto Literary Festival. His writing has appeared most recently in the anthologies, "Poetry in Flight : Poesia en Vuelo” and “The City is Already Speaking,” the City being San Francisco.

Third Place:

"Sessions In Augmented Reality"
Chicano writer Nicholas Belardes has appeared or is forthcoming in Latinx Archive: Speculative Fiction For Dreamers, Afterlives of the Writers, Acentos Review, Carve Magazine and others. He teaches for the Online MFA Creative Writing Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Nick lives in San Luis Obispo, California.

The First Place winner receives $100 and all three top finalists will get a copy of an original, first edition of Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), autographed by the author, Ernest Hogan, considered by all who care for the genre as the Godfather of Chicano ex-fi, who was the judge for this first competition.


Look for the winning short stories this November 2, Día de los Muertos, on this same batchannel.

Finalists:
“La Muñeca"
Carmen Baca, a long-time teacher in northern New Mexico where she lives, published her first novel in May 2017, El Hermano, a historical fiction based on her  father’s induction into the Penitente society and rise to El Hermano Mayor.

"Death Eye Dog"
Michelle Robles Wallace has an MFA from Mills College in Oakland and was a recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist’s Grant. In recent years, she ran the Kaleidoscope Reading Series and The Borderlands Lectura series.

Congratulations to the winners and our heart-felt encouragement to others who submitted their work.



—The Editor