Announcing the Annual Prize and Inaugural Award Event

	Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto

The memorial Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize is sponsored by the family of Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto to honor her devotion to the art of writing fiction, to expand the audience for outstanding short stories, and to encourage literary excellence among writers early in their careers. 

$2,000 will be awarded annually to the best work of short fiction published by the journal in a given calendar year, with a particular emphasis on work by an emerging or previously unpublished writer.

No application form is required; all short fiction submitted to the journal is eligible.

The inaugural prize-winning story will be selected from short fiction published by Blackbird in 2011 and will be announced in the fall 2011 issue. An award ceremony, featuring a reading by the prize-winner, will be held in March of 2012 on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto was born September 21, 1945 in Richmond, Virginia. She died in October of 2007 after being struck in a pedestrian crosswalk in Carmel by the Sea, California. Her sustained interest in writing led to her fiction being published in a number of literary journals as well as winning several competitions, including the 1996 and 2000 Short Fiction contests sponsored by Richmond Magazine. She was a graduate of St. Gertrude’s High School in Richmond and of Virginia Commonwealth University (class of 1967), and in 1971 she received an MA in English from the University of Michigan.