Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will introduce two winners of their annual Balcones Prizes: fiction winner Tara Laskowski and poetry winner Jacqueline Allen Trimble who will read from their winning books at 7 p.m. Feb. 22 at Malvern Books in Austin. 

Tara Laskowski is also the author of the flash fiction collection Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons, tales of dark etiquette. Her fiction has been published in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Best Small Fictions, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mid-American Review, and other places. She won the grand prize for the 2010 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards Series. Tara earned a BA in English with a minor in writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University. Since 2010, she has been the editor of the online flash fiction journal SmokeLong Quarterly.

American Happiness is Jacqueline Allen Trimble’s first book. A professor of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, she has published in The Griot, The Offing and The Blue Lake Review; she was a Cave Canem fellow and recipient of a literary arts fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2017.

The national awards include a $1.500 prize. More info on the Balcones Prizes at http://sites.austincc.edu/crw/for-students/the-rio-review/