The 2020 Veterans Story Contest winner was U.S. Army veteran Jill Baker of Sioux Falls, who received the $500 prize for her first-place poetry collection, “The Trigger Collection.” Baker, a U.S. Army veteran with PTSD, said her winning collection was curated from “tangled webs of messy emotions that I used to help me unravel the discord one step at a time. I am sharing them in chronological order as a way to demonstrate the process I took to help me work through months of harrowing days as a triggered Veteran.”
In second place was Dr. Tony Garcia for his story, “Short,” while Dawn Jones came in third for “Timing Beyond Our Control.” The top three read their stories in a special Zoom event during the Virtual 2020 Festival of Books, featuring U.S. Navy veteran and 2020 Festival presenter Jerri Bell.
At the 2019 contest, U.S. Army veteran Stephan Randall of Sioux Falls won first place for his essay “Mountain Climber,” while U.S. Marine Corps veteran Alex Sebbey’s “I’m Scared Too” won the video portion.
Robert Speirs won the 2017 Veterans Writing Prize for his essay “A Prayer for Brian Bradley.” The award that year was presented by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Olen Butler. In 2016, James R. Teller won first place for his essay “The Reunion.” The prize that year was presented by Ron Capps, creator of the Veterans Writing Project.