Congratulations to Lauryn Allison Lewis, winner of Knee-Jerk's 2011 Chapbook Contest. The Beauties, selected by guest judges Mary Hamilton and Lindsay Hunter, will be published in the fall.
Winner
Lauryn Allison Lewis - The Beauties
Finalists (in alphabetical order)
Kate Cantrill - Hello Friends and Neighbors
John Fleming - Lost Tribes
Ravi Mangla - Hear Ye Knives
Pedro Ponce - The Little Book of Conspiracies
Chad Simpson - Open Mic Night at the Fat Fish Pub
Jon Trobaugh - L'Anguille and Other Stories
A big thanks to Mary and Lindsay, and to the many writers who submitted collections.
If our bank account was a bit more Franzen-like, we'd go ahead and publish a bunch of these chapbooks.
In short, we're incredibly excited to publish The Beauties. We think you'll love it.
Love,
Knee-Jerk
Most people who know my dad, the founding-publisher of a regional magazine, will likely agree he is a complicated man. It is not uncommon for him to take out-of-town guests to visit his plot at the Texas State Cemetery. His idea of a fun night out: riding around in the back of an ambulance, answering calls with his friends at EMS. He has a police scanner in his bedroom, his office, and his car, holds a morbid fascination for venomous creatures, pandemics, and natural disasters, is obsessed with airplanes, Oreos and trains, and sends hundreds if not thousands of “On this day to remember…” emails to friends, family members, ex-girlfriends, and city officials, reminding them of miscellaneous anniversaries, including birthdays, graduations, major surgeries, minor surgeries, deaths, car wrecks, court dates, heart attacks, house fires, weddings and divorces. 
Dad would come outside after dinner during the summers and play catch with my brother and me, or play all-time quarterback while Steve and I ran pass routes that Dad would trace out on his chest, his back turned to the son who was on defense. He paid his mortgage, provided for the wife and kids by selling firefighting equipment, cleaned the dishes after my mom had cooked dinner. He drove fast in his Mustang; knew how to build things like closets and the back deck and the garden shed, complete with an attached clubhouse for my brother and me; worked his ass off in the yard transplanting tiger lilies he’d dug from the side of the road and dividing hostas the size of tables.
