Corina Bardoff

is a writer and librarian. Her story “Barbara Blue” won the 2025 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize and is part of a project to use the objects contained in fairy tales to create new work. Often inspired by fairy tales, her writing engages with constraint, interiority, and an imaginative affinity with animals and objects. Corina was born in Oakland, California, resides in Princeton, New Jersey, and lived lots of other places in between. (This website is a work in progress – more padding coming soon…)

Recent Writing:

“Child Verbs,”TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes, 2025

Objects are not alone in being subject to transformation, and after sweeping the hearth, I feel dangerously well.

Introduction and primary text, Not-So-Obscure Objects of Desire by Angelo Pastormerlo, 2025

There was a tumult made inaccessible to us now by the fortification of a parenthesis, but other tumults continue.

“Barbara Blue,” North American Review, 2025, winner of the 2025 Kurt Vonnegut Speculative Fiction Prize

selected by Kevin Brockmeier who called it “a story that’s in dialogue with a classic fairy tale—with several of them, in fact—and offers all the classical satisfactions but that still, somehow, consistently surprises you with its narrative maneuvers and its wily sensibility, sending out sparks and pinwheels of the most extraordinarily vibrant prose.”

“Baba Yaga Bi-Square,” Minor Literature[s], 2024

The Writer with the surgical wounds, having spent weeks in bed reading novels, wanted to be interesting to Baba Yaga and to befriend the Tsarevna.

“Chamomile,” Exacting Clam, 2023

Like a woman wearing perfume, I imagine chamomile wakes to the pleasure of its own earth-apple aroma, but then stops noticing.

“West Elm Chair,” Hunger Mountain Review, 2023

There was no front door. There were no hallways either, no connective tissue, only swift transitions between living and dining and bath and bed, a glossiness and brightness, but such a stillness she couldn’t breathe.

“Uncertain Soup,” “To Begin,” and “No-No Knead Bread,” Exacting Clam, 2022

Carrots missed the bus and had to walk along the busy road, all in her lace.

“The Quellers of the Flood,” Exacting Clam, 2021, nominated for a Pushcart Prize

There are a million precious animals that live inside my body and all of them are drowning in a terrible flood. 

“How Nice,” Storm Cellar, 2020

I considered whether being nice to me was an initiation ritual or the ultimate goal of the society.

“Hairpin,” Menacing Hedge, 2020

Without knowing it, I had always wanted to feel precisely this way while looking at something.