FIRST PLACE
"After all the papers have been burned, your mother begins spooning the food into the stream. You watch the bright red stew seep into the water, dollop by dollop, like watercolor."
CREATIVE NONFICTION: MOUTH GARDEN - JULIE MOON
Mouth Garden is a memoir in lyric fragments about my grandmother, me, and 100 years of modern Korean history. Part oral history, part cultural criticism, and part hybrid prose, the book explores finding one's voice through three generations of trauma, ambition, and love.
Bio: Julie Moon is a Korean writer and teacher with an MFA in Nonfiction and Literary Translation from Columbia University. She is the winner of The Missouri Review's Audio Prize in Poetry. You can read her publications at www.juliemoon.info.
“It’s the kind of brilliantly lit night my mother used to call washed because that was her first frame of reference for things. Was it washed and clean, or was it dirty? This was to help her figure out how much work something was going to be for her, but once you start looking at the world that way, all manner of objects and people sort themselves into a clean pile and a dirty pile.”
FICTION: BLACK RIVER - SANDY NIETLING
For Josie Briggs in 1927, marriage is the key to financial security and respectability. She might even fall in love if she’s lucky. But when her new husband abruptly disappears, she must search for him with the help of his lawless brother. Black River explores the intersections of loyalty and sacrifice.
Bio: Sandy Nietling is a writer and communications professional based in West Michigan. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Quarter After Eight, and New Ohio Review. She is currently at work on two novels.
SECOND PLACE
"There are secrets there, toothed and rubied. She is not to blame, like my cat who won’t give up her hiding spot in the woods out back. Each evening, I call and call, play with the tinkle bell of a spoon against her canned tuna."
CREATIVE NONFICTION: WHAT KIND OF HAWK - SARAH GIRAGOSIAN
What Kind of Hawk is a collection of essays that explore the possibilities and limits of animal representation, the challenges and joys of wildlife rehabilitation (I volunteer as a certified wildlife rehabilitator), as well as the complex, fraught terrain of human and animal ontologies. What does it mean to be a surrogate mother to a baby beaver? Or to tend to the bloody sanctum of an injured raptor's aviary? These essays explore the possibility of reciprocal relation among creatures, human and animal alike. It is also a collection that explores motherhood (including inter-species, biological, and queer motherhood) in all its iterations. In this collection, you will find lyric and hybrid essays, such as catalogue and collage essays.
Bio: Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited. In 2024, Middle Creek Press published Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Sarah's writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, Pleiades and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
"Some part of the Living does still hear spirits even when they not paying attention. They does hear what they need to hear when they need to hear it. We does keep talking either way."
FICTION: THAT NIGHT AT THE JUBILEE HOTEL - STEPHANIE RAMLOGAN
One year after a spectacular wedding takes place at the Jubilee Hotel, the narrator, a charismatic spirit who has lived there for about a century, excitedly recounts the mysterious events surrounding that night to a new spirit that he meets wandering around the hallways.
Bio: Stephanie Ramlogan is a Caribbean writer whose fiction is built around the people, culture and folklore of Trinidad and Tobago. She is the recipient of the 2022 Iowa Review Fiction Award, and the 2020 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writer's Prize, among others. Stephanie has an MFA in Creative Writing.
THIRD PLACE
"On my first night in jail, my period arrived as a secret my body forgot to tell me. There are a few tampons stacked neatly in the window sill. Pads must be purchased with a commissary. I do not know what a commissary is. I force my thighs together like two palms praying nothing leaks out onto the mattress, the one I was told to pick up like a cross and carry into the cell."
CREATIVE NONFICTION: I AM MOSTLY BAD BLOOD - STARR DAVIS
I Am Mostly Bad Blood, a nonfiction work, delves into the complexities of motherhood and menstruation. It intertwines deeply personal experiences with broader themes of gender, justice, and bodily autonomy, providing a reflective and thought-provoking narrative.
Bio: Starr Davis, an accomplished writer and mother, has been published in The Kenyon Review and The Rumpus. With an MFA from City College of New York, she’s a 2024 Writing Freedom Fellow. Her forthcoming poetry book, AFFIDAVIT, will be released by Hanging Loose Press in 2025.
"I never quite became human, but I became visible, which is better. When my titties invaded, my body stopped being mine–but then I had never been mine in the first place."
FICTION: THE CREATION OF AUDREY - HOPE KOKOT
The Creation of Audrey centers on a young autistic woman's coming-of-age as she survives childhood sexual abuse, the death of her mother, an abusive relationship, and early motherhood. As she fights for daily survival, she gradually discovers her own identity.
Bio: Hope Kokot lives in New York City. Her short story "Bill Rainey Park" was a finalist for Pleiades Magazine's Kinder-Crump Award for New Fiction, and she has performed in poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Bowery Powery Club, and the Busboys & Poets Cafe, among others. She is autistic.
SANDRA CARPENTER PRIZE FOR CREATIVE NONFICTION - 2024 WINNER
“A voice beckons to me from our little room, where my mother perhaps waves her hand, trying to get me to come back to naptime. I shake my head, or I stare at her, and I stay by my sunshine and my rumbling wall. My resistance is simply an act of communication, simply my body saying, I want to stay.”
MINOR REBEL - JIADAI LIN
Minor Rebel examines the blurred lines between good girl and rebel, silence and expression, ambition and disappointment. Traced through the quiet rebellions of an immigrant daughter, this coming-of-age memoir seeks to recast rebellion as a worthy tool of self-examination, signaling not impulsive defiances but expressions of our truest desires.
Bio: Jiadai Lin was born in Beijing and grew up in Wisconsin and New York. In 2015, she left her corporate law job in Manhattan to pursue a writer's life in New Mexico, where she lives now. Her work has been published in Brevity, december, Pigeon Pages, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.