Danny Eisenberg is the 2026 winner of the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize for outstanding short fiction. His story “Also, the Therapist is a Dog,” published in v23n2 in the fall of 2024, was selected by our editors from short fiction published by Blackbird over the previous two-year period.
Eisenberg’s story, “Also, the Therapist is a Dog” is an absurdist gem – the kind of story that opens with a car crashing through a window and treats it as almost beside the point. At its center is a man whose therapy sessions have trained him to carefully qualify every feeling he has, narrating his own romantic and emotional life like a man footnoting his own memoir. When a silver SUV jumps a curb and the man, barely flinching, locks eyes with a handsome stranger across the chaos, something new happens to him – something even his therapist can’t over-explain away. What follows is a love story told in dinners, lubricants, mountain goats, and one magnificent evasion of answers.
We invite you to read this wonderful story here: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/also-the-therapist-is-a-dog/
The Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize is sponsored by the family of Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto in her memory to honor her devotion to the art of writing fiction, to expand the audience for outstanding short stories, and to encourage literary excellence among writers early in their careers.
Currently, a prize of $2,000 is offered every other year for the best work of short fiction published by Blackbird during that period, with a particular emphasis on work by an emerging or underappreciated writer.
Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto was born September 21, 1945 in Richmond, Virginia. She died in October of 2007 after being struck in a pedestrian crosswalk in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Her sustained interest in writing led to her fiction being published in a number of literary journals as well as winning several competitions, including the 1996 and 2000 Short Fiction contests sponsored by Richmond Magazine. She was a graduate of St. Gertrude’s High School in Richmond and of Virginia Commonwealth University (class of 1967), and in 1971 she received an MA in English from the University of Michigan.
Her husband, David H. Tarumoto, who established the award at VCU in 2010, resided in California and passed away in 2016 at the age of seventy-five.
While funding for the prize itself comes from David Tarumoto’s endowment, the Department of English welcomes contributions in support of the celebration. Anyone wishing to make a donation is invited to visit the secure online contributions page https://www.support.vcu.edu/give/fund?fund=4910.
