An Annual Visitation: First Place for Biography Prose, Southwest Writers
In October, Ukraine appears in my rear-view mirror. Driving across the South Dakota prairie alone, I have come to expect this annual visitation. The country’s outline does not emerge near the anniversary of my father’s death. He died on the last day of June. It is disconnected from his birth under an Aquarius sun during […]
Time Between Hours: Second Place for Spiritual Poetry, Southwest Writers
For three days and three nights, the wind did not blow. I did not dream, but listened to coyotes singing off-key in the cattail reeds and cornfields. The wind has gone out of the farm because Dad isn’t here, you said. Still, on the day of the funeral, a breeze like a faint exhale came […]
The Politics of Naming
On the page, I play with the words and definitions I have scribbled: exile, refugee, expatriate, immigrant, emigrant, displaced, and evicted. The meanings of these words complement and compete with each other. Each label is by turns romantic and a badge of social disdain. Exile: forced removal from one’s country, a person involuntarily separating oneself […]
A past that never arrives
Heirlooms from my father’s family wrapped in brown paper packages with blue ink and foreign postmarks faded by a prairie rain burst will not be delivered to the cream house with green trim and gable roof where I live. The house belongs to my husband in name only — that’s what he tells me. But […]
Time of death: six thirty a.m.
Awoken with a start from a restless sleep, I grope not for my watch or the battery-operated alarm clock. I do not reach for my smudged glasses, either, but instead fumble for the switch on the floor to turn on the Christmas tree lights. The miniature lights twinkle. The early, frigid darkness sparkles like counterfeit […]
The Inventory of War
Wars fought in books are orderly. Only dates and figures box suffering between worn covers. In truth, those who survive remember everything: those who wept, those with faith, those bearing false witness, those who refuse to forget. Inventories are taken. These are the dead. From war. A family walks the earth to find an unmarked […]
The politics of bread
Why is it always about fucking bread? I reach deep into the freezer on a crusade to vilify the starchy culprits, violently casting everything I find to the floor. Stiff hamburger buns skid across the linoleum. Two slices of pita bread soar over my shoulder. Half-eaten loaves of focaccia and olive bread come to an […]
Meet ANNA SOCHOCKY
My work has appeared in the Waterstone Literary Journal and has received Honorable Mentions in the New Millennium Writings and Fourth Genre Journals and third prize in the Larry Turner Award for Nonfiction.
I have been awarded Creative Nonfiction Mentorships with the SASE Nonfiction Mentorship Program and the Loft Literary Center, received residencies with Norcroft: A Writing Retreat for Women and the Room of Her Own Foundation.
I am a graduate of the Hamline Graduate of Liberal Studies program and the recipient of the Outstanding Creative Thesis Award. Learn more about me…
For information about my story, for interviews, and other inquiries, please contact me.