We are pleased to announce that Molly Reid is the winner of the seventh annual BOA Short Fiction Prize for her collection The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary! Reid will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. within the American Reader Series in spring 2019.

Of the collection, BOA Publisher Peter Conners says: “The ingredients for Molly Reid’s The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary: whimsy, spiked with darkness, splashed with mystery, and served in a brilliant chalice of literary cut crystal. The glass breaks, the liquid spills out, and we stand in awe of the shimmering (and dangerous) shards that slice like heartbreak, and shiver like bittersweet memory. Drink deep; this book is an intoxicant.”

The Rapture Index was selected from a pool of over 300 submissions. A finalist and five runners-up were also selected:

• Walking Dogs by Brian Wood (finalist)
• Everything Was Beautiful & Nothing Hurt by Sabrina Mark
• Semiotic Love by Brian Whalen
• The Family in Question by Evan Lavender-Smith
• Maintaining Good Posture towards Bethlehem by Sean Bernard
• Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda.

Molly Reid’s stories have appeared on NPR and in the journals Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, The Pinch, and The Normal School, among others. She has received fellowship and residency support from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the I-Park Foundation Artist-in-Residence Program, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati and is at work on a novel.

BOA Editions will accept manuscripts for the eighth annual BOA Short Fiction Prize between April 1 - May 31, 2018. An entry form and a $25 fee are required. Complete guidelines for the 2017 BOA Short Fiction Prize are available at boaeditions.org.

Congratulations, Molly, and welcome to the BOA family!