Zach Powers '02 (jazz studies) is the winner of the fifth annual BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize for his collection, Gravity Changes.

Zach Powers '02 is the winner of the fifth annual BOA Editions Short Fiction Prize for his collection, Gravity Changes. The collection was selected from nearly 200 submissions by BOA Publisher Peter Conners. Powers will receive a $1,000 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. within the American Reader Series in spring 2017.

Of the collection, Peter Conners says: “Zach Powers wields a unique talent for creating strange and surreal worlds that, somehow, illuminate true human emotion more realistically than the realest realist. His characters defy gravity, sprout siblings from their shoulders, shrink universes with performance art, and tap into well-hidden, magical corners of the quotidian world. It is an honor to award him the fifth annual BOA Short Fiction Prize.”

Zach Powers’ work appears widely in such places as the Black Warrior Review, Forklift, Ohio, The Conium Review, Caketrain, and elsewhere. The co-founder of the literary arts not-for-profit Seersucker Live, he also leads the writers’ workshop at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home, where he served on the board of directors. His writing for television won an Emmy, and he is a columnist for Savannah Morning News. He lives and writes in Savannah, Georgia.