Wisconsin People & Ideas 2024 Fiction and Poetry Contest Winners

Bob Wake is a writer and small press publisher in Cambridge, Wisconsin. He is the first-place winner of the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest, which he also won in 2017. His short stories have appeared in Madison Magazine, The Madison Review, Rosebud Magazine, and in Wisconsin People & Ideas. He is a recipient of the Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

C. E. Perry is a family medicine physician and lives with her family in Madison, Wisconsin. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and Dartmouth Medical School, she published a book of poems, Night Work, in 2009 with Sarabande Press. She is finishing the first of a series of mystery novels set on a fictional island off the coast of Maine. Her entry in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest was her first short story and she won second-prize. 

Linda Falkenstein is associate editor of Isthmus newspaper. She is the third-place fiction winner in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. She has received numerous Milwaukee Press Club awards for her journalism and previously published short fiction in Kansas Quarterly. She lives in Madison.

Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest. She is the first-place poetry winner in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. Her poems are featured or forthcoming in RHINO, Foglifter, Adroit, diode, The Offing, BAHR Magazine, and others. She is currently studying Creative Writing and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison through the First Wave program. Find more of their work at diyabbas.com.

Han Raschka is a Pushcart-nominated feminist poet whose work focuses on personal and collective traumas, resilience, and queer existence. They are the second-place poetry winner in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. They have been published in various periodicals such as Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review, The Lake County Bloom, and CERASUS Magazine, among others. Their first collection, Splinters (Collapse Press) was released in 2022 and was nominated for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award. In 2023, they released a chapbook, Enamel (Bottlecap Press). Han was a 2023 finalist for the Charles M. Hart Jr. Award and a 2024 finalist for the Therese Muller Memorial Nonfiction Award at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they study creative writing. They currently reside in Madison, WI with their fiancée.

The poems of Lisa Vihos have appeared in many poetry journals and anthologies. She is the third-place poetry winner in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. Winner of the 2023 Hal Prize, she has four chapbooks, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and numerous awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, including first-prize in the Wisconsin People & Ideas poetry contest in 2015. In 2020, she was named Sheboygan’s first poet laureate. In 2022 she published her first novel, a historical fiction about a late Renaissance woman artist, The Lone Snake: The Story of Sofonisba Anguissola.