“The voice is electric and immediate, the setting beautifully and vividly rendered, and the writing itself is tight and lyrical without ever calling attention to itself. A tremendously smart and evocative story by a writer who appears to have talent in spades.”
— Molly Antopol, on choosing Carrie Cogan's story "Birds of Paradise" as winner of the 2015 Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize
“Carrie is a singular and marvelous presence on the page.”
— Francois Camoin
“The voice of this essay moved like wind through hollowed-out bone, to borrow one of its countless haunted images. There’s an electric and infinitely compelling relationship dramatized here between various dimensions of the self—past and present, person and pathology—and pivots of mind and heart, moments of insight and feeling, that I will never forget.”
— Leslie Jamison, on choosing Carrie Cogan's essay "Lowest of the low on a high red hill" as winner of The 2023 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction contest
“Her writing has a special brand of intelligence, which never loses contact with her heart.”
