Chez Robert Giron

January 23, 2018. Congratulations to Rochelle Distelheim of Highland Park, Illinois whose story titled More Cousin's Club than Country has won the 2017 Gival Press Short Story Award, judged anonymously by Elaine C. Ray.

Distelheim's story is posted on the Gival Press website and will appear in ArLiJo. The award carries a cash prize of 1K.

Praise "In More Cousin’s Club than Country, Rochelle Distelheim deftly lures readers into a world that is at once intimately specific and universally resonant. Each of her characters is vividly drawn with dimension and agency. The narrator, Russian, Jewish and a woman, charms us with a voice full of vulnerability, wit and compassion. Set in Jerusalem in the early 1990s, the story explores the unsettling experience of leaving behind an oppressive culture and adjusting to a new but imperfect home. More Cousin’s Club than Country is grounded in history, imbued with humanity and threaded with that universal theme—hair.”
—Elaine C. Ray, judge

Photo by Lisa Barron.

Click here for the link to the Rochelle Distelheim webpage:
Distelheim (GPSS-2017), Rochelle

About the Author
Rochelle Distelheim has published in North American Review, Ascent, Other Voices, Descant, StoryQuarterly, Sequestrum, Nimrod, JewishFiction.net, PersimmonTree.org, and Press 53 Anthology, Everywhere Stories. She has received The Katharine Anne Porter Prize, Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and Fellowships,The Ragdale Foundation Fellowships, Glimmer Train Second Place, Emerging Writers, and nominations for The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Press Prize. Her debut novel, Sadie in Love (Abade Publishing) will be released in early May 2018.

The finalists include:
How to Juggle by Noah Weisz of Austin, Texas.
The Island of No Secrets by Louis Dellaguzzo of Washington, DC.
Captain Death by Susan Lowell of Tucson, Arizona.
My Brother Billy Penn by Brian Heston of Atlanta, Georgia.