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Let me start off by congratulating everyone who entered. Why everyone who entered and not just those who won? Well, it’s simple, really. To begin with, nothing can take away from winning what we hope will one day become a coveted award: The Pif Prize. Our winners are to be applauded, surely. They are to be commended for shining above and beyond the rest. But those who entered, those who toiled and sweated and poured their hearts out onto the papers they sent us also deserve our commendations. The quality of the entries we received was overwhelming. And to know that there is this vast pool of talented writers out there who continue to put pen to paper day after day, who humbly send off their creations to the likes of us in hopes that we will nod approvingly, oh, it makes every hour of our day that much more sweet. I wish we could have handed out a great big gold medal to everyone who entered, but, alas, we can’t. We have to draw the line somewhere. It’s not an easy task. And because of that, I want to thank Allison Jenks for all of her hard and thoughtful work as this year’s judge of all things poetic. For those of you who don’t know, Allison appears regularly within these pages. A James A. Michener fellow at the University of Miami's M.F.A. program, where she teaches undergraduate creative writing, Allison is the Editor In Chief of the Mangrove Literary Magazine. Her first book of poetry, The Liquid in Love , was published in 1995. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you do. Again, thanks to everyone. I hope all of you will return for the 1998 Poetry & Fiction Contest.