We are thrilled to announce that Andrea Abi-Karam has chosen Memoria, by Michelle Lizet Flores, as the winner of the 2019 Get Like Us contest!

“Memoria or an "attempt to fly without wings" stitches ancestral memory, immigration narratives, intergenerational trauma together in a prosodic-lyric web whose spine is the premature death of the narrator's mother. Amidst the darkness of grief and struggle, the faultlines that the loss of a parent cracks open confer a great heaviness. Our inability to stave off death leaves us to hang, along with our bathing suits, dresses, jackets, buttons, in the space between survival and death.” - Andrea Abi-Karam

Michelle Lizet Flores is a graduate of FSU and NYU creative writing programs. She currently works as a middle school English teacher and has previously been published in magazines and journals such as The Miami Rail, Chircú Journal, and Travel Latina. A finalist for the 2020 Sandy Crimmins National Prize for Poetry, her first chapbook, Cuentos from the Swamp, is available from Finishing Line Press. Find out more at michellelizetflores.com.

Preorder Memoria here!

2019 Girls Like Us Chapbook Contest

Winner: "Memoria" by Michelle Lizet Flores

Runner up: "6:29am, below sea level" by Maurisa Li-A-Ping F

inalists (in alphabetical order):
"Extended Voicemail to a Senator" by Meriwether Clarke
"Boys in the Electric Age" by Jordan E. Franklin
"Nightstands" by Sugar le Fae
"Differential diagnosis from the Santa Anas" by Leah Claire Kaminski
"Heaven Is Now" by Risa Pappas
"Defending Cressida" by Kathryn Paulsen
"From the Soot" Kyleen Russell