Winner!!!

Alissa Nutting of Las Vegas, Nevada, is the winner of the 6th Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction contest (2009-10) for her manuscript, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Nutting was selected from among five finalists by Final Judge Ben Marcus.

Alissa Nutting received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, where she served as editor for the Black Warrior Review. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, where she is the Schaeffer Fellow in Fiction.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls is a hilarious and terrifically inventive collection of short fiction where each story in the book is predicated upon a would-be career choice for women. The stories are titled, sometimes very fancifully, after these "unclean jobs," such as "Model's Assistant," "Knife-Thrower," "Bandleader's Girlfriend," "Corpse Smoker," and "She-Man." Ten of the stories hagve been published in literary journals, including Tin-House, Mid-American Review, Denver Quarterly, Southeast Review, and Swink.

Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls will be Nutting's debut book. Although it is not a condition of the prize, all six times the Starcherone Prize has been awarded, it has gone to a debut author. Previous winners of the Starcherone Fiction Prize have gone on to win even more critical accolades for their work: most notably, Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey, selected for the Starcherone Prize in 2006, went on to be named one of five nominees for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, given to the best work of fiction by a writer 35 years of age. The other previous winners of the Starcherone Prize have been Aimee Parkison, Nina Shope, Sara Greenslit, and Janet Mitchell.

The blind-judged contest drew a total of 209 entries in 2009. The 7th Starcherone Prize contest (2010-11) will begin accepting entries in October 2009, with a final deadline in February 2010.