⭐ Thank you to everyone who sent work for this year’s prize! Winners and finalists along with our esteemed judges are listed below. ⭐
Winner selected by Julia Kolchinsky:
Autobiography of a Violin by Cassie Burkhardt
Editor’s Choice:
Red and Yellow Light over the Top of Houses by Dolapo Demuren
The Year I Carried You by Sara Shea
Arouse Yourself by Yin Cheng
True Apothecary by Ellie Gold Laabs
The Widower Writes from the Shipwreck by Ellie Gold Laabs
Winner selected by Tom Paine:
While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game by Jim Parisi
Editor’s Choice:
The Summer He Left by Alison Sanders
Solitary Creatures by Charlie Rogers & Jaime Gill
Winner selected by Kristine Langley Mahler:
I Conjure My Great-Grandmother and Ask for Her Life Story. She Visits My Dreams and Gives Me a Lesson on Revision by Alayna Powell
Editor’s Choice:
The Leftovers by Michelle La Vone
Winner selected by Michael Czyzniejewski:
When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort by Sharon Lee Snow
Editor’s Choice:
Take Me Through the Finish by Tom Ziemer
Winner selected by Brenna Womer :
The Laundry Hangs at Noon by Ginger Tolman
Editor’s Choice:
36 Hours in Lecce by Anne Schuchman
2025 Finalists:
Poetry:
The cure to all the maladies by Jonathan Greenhause
Red and Yellow Light over the Top of Houses by Dolapo Demuren
Every Room is a Sonnet by Dolapo Demuren
Drowned Crawdads by Sara Shea
The Year I Carried You by Sara Shea
Wedged Together We Are Flying by Reva Johnson
Silence bears no fruit by Erwin Arroyo Pérez
English Is My Second Language by Erwin Arroyo Pérez
Yes, she did by Ashlie Hyer
Autobiography of a Violin by Cassie Burkhardt
Arouse Yourself by Yin Cheng
Surely Every Man is Mere Breath by Yin Cheng
The Weight of His Chair by Sam Aureli
True Apothecary by Ellie Gold Laabs
The Widower Writes from the Shipwreck by Ellie Gold Laabs
Short Fiction:
Theatre of Solace by Nicole Bazemore
Peabody by Joe Cappello
Mr. Jensen by Madeline Rosales
Take Me Through the Finish by Tom Ziemer
When Mr. Boppo Joined the Cohort by Sharon Lee Snow
Flash Fiction:
Before the Everything After by Jaime Gill & Charlie Rogers
Solitary Creatures by Jaime Gill & Charlie Rogers
Do You by Alison Sanders
While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game by Jim Parisi
The Summer He left by Alison Sanders
Hands by Pam Anderson
Flash Creative NonFiction:
The Leftovers by Michelle La Vone
Attack by Ginger Tolman
Protocols and Such by Camara Garrett
I Conjure My Great-Grandmother and Ask for Her Life Story. She Visits My Dreams and Gives Me a Lesson on Revision by Alayna Powell
Short Creative Nonfiction:
On the Telephone with Mom by Dean Gessie
36 Hours in Lecce by Anne Schuchman
The Laundry Hangs at Noon by Ginger Tolman
Contest Details:
Up to fifteen finalists in poetry and three to six in each of the other genres – short fiction, flash fiction, short creative nonfiction, and flash creative nonfiction – were selected as finalists by our current editorial teams and sent to our guest judges who will select a winner. The judges this year are Julia Kolchinsky (poetry), Brenna Womer (short cnf), Kristine Langley Mahler (flash cnf), Michael Czyzniejewski (flash fiction), and Tom Paine (short fiction). More about them below.
The winning entry in each of the five categories will receive $300, publication in our summer 2025 issue, and a jar of honey from a Midwest apiary. 🍯 Other select finalists will also be invited to be published in the issue with an honorarium of $75.
Meet the 2025 Judges…
Poetry:
Julia Kolchinsky is the author of four poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, 40 WEEKS, and PARALLAX (The University of Arkansas Press, 2025) finalist for the Miller Williams Prize. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, with nonfiction in Brevity, Shenandoah, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is at work on a collection of linked lyric essays about parenting her neurodiverse child and the end of her marriage under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia’s birthplace. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Denison University.
Short Creative Nonfiction:
Brenna Womer (she/they) is a queer, childfree, Latine prose writer and poet and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Fresno. She’s the author of the full-length, mixed-genre collections Unbrained (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and Honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), as well as the chapbooks Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018) and cost of living (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.
Flash Creative Nonfiction:
Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books: A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (WVU Press, 2022), and Teen Queen Training (forthcoming with Autofocus, 2026). Her work has been supported by the Nebraska Arts Council and Art at Cedar Point and twice named Notable in Best American Essays. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska. She is the director of Split/Lip Press.
Flash Fiction:
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.
Short Fiction:
TOM PAINE’s fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope, Boston Review, The New England Review, The O. Henry Awards and twice in the Pushcart Prize. His first collection, Scar Vegas (Harcourt), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Pen/Hemingway finalist. A graduate of Princeton and the Columbia MFA program, he is a professor in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.