It’s a wonderful privilege to spend months reading every entry, and the chief pleasure of our professional lives as publishers to bring you the winning entries listed below.
We must begin by sincerely thanking each entrant for entrusting us with their work, and for thinking of us as a suitable home for their writing. It is evident how much care, and time is poured into each precious entry. If you don’t appear on the lists this time, please don’t lose optimism. Our most sincere wish is that every writer in our community achieves their writing goals, and we continue to hope we can play a role in that journey.
To those listed below, we take our hats off to you. We have been moved, informed, delighted, entertained, inspired, and educated by your writing. Your pieces have enriched our lives. The Short Fiction winners showed us, in the most sublime settings, that no matter how the human experience of life evolves over time, it is still the same heart beating beneath. We wrestle with concepts of meaning, impermanence, and inevitable change over time, while we seek love, understanding, and forgiveness. Above all, connection, connection, connection.
The winners of the Poetry category explore astonishing new languages to express the human condition: As our experience of the world is mediated increasingly via the digital, we must find a digitally inflected language to continue to express the human, while the ever-loudening drum of nostalgia beats. We cannot turn back the clock, but we need not abandon what was precious about the past. ‘The Word’ takes us to the dawn of time in a search for self, while ‘Grapes and Questions’ appears to puzzle at the edges of motivation itself, at the energy that drives us forward through time, and how we construct meaning on this journey.
Our Nonfiction winners helped us to understand certain complexities, and see the world in a new light, by bringing different times and places into relation: We see each proffered world more clearly when they are compared and contrasted. Again, the winning pieces were deeply revealing works. Intimate. Personal. We feel we have been entrusted with important, perhaps sacred knowledge. We, too, are now keepers of the flame. In the Books category we were particularly impressed by writing that faced some of the darker and more challenging corners of the zeitgeist with a grim and fascinating humor: Stars dancing in the night sky against the darkness. Thank you for making us laugh, while educating us.
In short, we’ve been astonished, and we can’t wait for you to experience what we have too. To our readers: Clear an afternoon or two. We believe these literary works represent just about the most rewarding way to invest your time.
Short Fiction
Winners
- Edward Boyle – The Whale in the Channel
- Quinn Theobald – Solar Wind
- Sigrun Benjamin – Screams of Renovation
Shortlist
- Jennifer Grant – Mother’s House
- Barry R. Ziman – Will-O’-The-Wisp
- Thomas Hudson – After the Fire
- Kevin M. Flanagan – Aisle 12
- Cheryl Jean Kelley – Set Apart
- Alves dos Santos – The Geography of Silences
- Margaret Dunn – Lucie and Selene
- Gemma Thomas – Two Blue Lines
- Elliot Smith – Sunnymede
- Henrick Karoliszyn – Illegal Formation
- Michael Brown – Words
Poetry
Winners
- Ashley Williamson – The Word
- Audrey Andrade – Grapes and Questions
- Micheline Denn – Anxiety Controller
- Laura Cococcia – No Signature
Shortlist
- Kimaya Ghoge – i dream easy, now / another world is underway
- Maria Sahines – Pose
- Liam M. Murphy – Sonnet for a Son
- Madhavi Naik – A Drop in Ocean
- Sam Viavant – The Flavor of Time
- Artem Dotsenko – My Mama Gave Me a Magic Clicker
- Maricarmen Garcia-Ramos – Endangered Species Act (ESA) – Law No. 241
- G.R. Kramer – These Things Lie Buried but Not Forgotten
- Ute Carson – Clouds Roll In
Nonfiction
Winners
Shortlist
- Arti Jain – The Many Shapes of Grief
- Emily Newcomer – Missing
- Jeniah Johnson – Unearthing
- Jack Cooper – My Mother Rose
- Elisa Chi – Selfish Coffee
- Andrew McGee – Jack and Dons
- Margaret Combs – Earth to Earth
- Liz Muhs Stone – The Gamblers
- Mariem Khaled – Sun of Man
- Paul Dufficy – Lost Things
- Alison Foster – Twelve and a Half
- Caroline Grant – Kitchen Fires
- Kate DeLong – The Day My Father Went to Mars
- Crystal A. Frost – What The Lyme Lady Made Me Do
- Mary Caffrey – The Real Thing
- Kevin Kearney – Some Skins You Learn To Live In, & The Bypass and the Boy
- Diana Cypher – The Booth
- Anne Adams – The Wave
Books
Winners
Shortlist
- LaToya Hayes – Shenry 20
- Max Accardi – In Deep Waters
- Ari Laurel – Farming Fable
- Michael Tilbury – Eat
- Connor Petty – Crepuscularity
- Lori Crispo – The 44 Mistakes
- Valerio Zanini – Under Two Separate Skies
- Christopher Meeks – When A Line Touches a Curve
- J.M.C. Kane – Less Quietly
- Marianne Tan – The Dragon and the Saint
- Peter Hogenkamp – Our Lady of the Golden Arches
- Lumina Miller – Grateful
- Eric Neumayer – Beyond The Life That Was
- Aubrie Dolan – The Hostess
- Meg Toth – To Be Real
- Sarai Nichole – Excerpts From My Journal
- Sheryl White – Endless Sea
- Casey Charles – Expiration Date
- Natalie S. Harnett – Hallet House
- Coco Seney – The Girls I Was Before