The latest news

I've had a few exciting things happen lately: 

Happy to say that my short fiction piece "Talking Trojans" won Fiction International 2015 Short Short Fiction Prize. Harold Jaffe's summary of the piece and a link to the story can be found here: http://fictioninternational.sdsu.edu/wordpress/contest/ 

“Talking Trojans” melds compression, humor, keen intelligence, and social awareness into a savory 300 words. The references to Roland Barthes and his fetishization of language, especially his Lover’s Discourse, is cunning and comical. Where is the virus? Perhaps it is in the lover’s “discourse,” the language, however refined, which obscures the virulent spaces eroding between the words and all about us. —Harold Jaffe, editor-in-chief, Fiction International

(Winning that contest, as some of you know, was especially welcome news, as I had placed as a runner-up, honorable mention, and finalist in a dozen or so contests in the last year or so, but, alas, had yet to win any of them. The $500 check was also very welcome,  some of which was necessarily spent on some celebratory prosecco!)

Very grateful too for the interview at Mid-American Review: 
http://casit.bgsu.edu/marblog/mar-asks-andrea-witzke-slot-answers/

Happy to say a small slice of the novel  is out there in the world to sample, in the form of a short story titled "Penelope thinks she remembers her father" at LItro NY.
http://www.litrony.com/2015/04/penelope-thinks-she-remembers-her-father/

And, alas, a poem I'd like to share more widely. This particular poem, "Regret," sums up a thousand apologies for not being good at returning phone calls or emails or even texts. Please forgive me, family, friends, and strangers, too: http://www.mid.muohio.edu/segue/12/12_slot.pdf