We received over 1,100 submissions this year. In addition to receiving $1,000 each, the winners will be published in our Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe today so you don’t miss any of this incredible work.

Judge Lorrie Moore chose Drew Calvert’s short story “The Understudy” and Ariel Katz’s “Craters of the Moon” as the cowinners of the fiction contest. 

Moore writes, “‘Craters of the Moon’ is searching and searing.  It’s about both looking back and not looking back at trauma and betrayal. Thus it is not remotely nostalgic for youth yet has a melancholy music throughout its narration—punctuated with absurdity, interesting shoes, and some humor too astute for laughter. No matter how lost these people are, pity is not part of the picture:  movement is. Can one get from North Carolina to Idaho in a single day?  I googled it and am still not sure.  But this is a story about holding belief and disbelief simultaneously and carrying on regardless.” 

Of Calvert’s story, Moore says, “‘The Understudy’ is a tour de force of affectionate social satire.  It is the-way-we-live-now (in New York) fiction, and it is as if its cast of Jamesian young adults has been repurposed for the current moment by Martin Amis. Each sentence is brimming with intelligence, heart, and comedic tension.” 

Finalists for the 2024 contest in fiction were: Madalena Roeber-Tsiongas, Aurora Huiza, Emma Watson, Isabelle Appleton, Ashland Hubbard, Audrey Kelly, Akhim Alexis, and Jill Rosenberg. 

John Jeremiah Sullivan chose Johanna Bissat’s essay “The Bandit” as this year’s nonfiction winner. 

Of the piece, Sullivan writes, “I sensed that ‘The Bandit’ would probably get the prize when I read the sentence in which an old woman stands by the side of the freeway, holding an infant (the author), and notices that raindrops are hitting the baby’s eyelashes. It was how the writer said eyelashes, not eyes. I read to experience moments like that, when some detail is added to my awareness of the world. It’s an essay about a father whom the writer never knew, but we feel strangely close to him, even (or especially) when he is lonely on a fishing boat in the northern ocean, recording cassette tapes to send home to his wife. The last line is mysterious and perfect.”

“To Traverse This Somber Age” by Spencer Lane Jones was selected as the runner-up. “By focusing on a specific vein in Simone Weil’s biography—her time as a schoolteacher in a provincial French town and her later correspondence with one of the students—the writer lets us appreciate a certain beautiful aspect of Weil’s life and personality: the way in which her social oddity and spiritual nobility, or her bookish introversion and political courage, were entwined,” Sullivan writes. “This graceful essay speaks with more relevance than one might wish to our own moment.” 

Finalists for the 2024 contest in nonfiction were: Stephanie Cotsirilos, Mary Herrington-Perry, Matthew Zipf, Sarah Renee Beach, Emily Mathis, Sarah Neidhardt, Aimee Liu, Julie Marie Wade.

In poetry, Shane McCrae chose “The Soft Life of a Black Man” by Kyle Okeke as the winner. 

Of Okeke’s poem, McCrae writes,  “Lately, I’ve found myself most drawn to poems that sing with an assured voice. I don’t know how to describe what an assured voice sounds like except to say that the sound is the sound of something that is entirely itself. “‘The Soft Life of a Black Man’” is entirely itself, meaning it is finally unreachable, but capable of profoundly altering whatever reaches for it. Its lines are unassuming, but each of them, more often than not, is immediately followed by a surprise, or at the very least a line that confirms the poet’s unerring judgment with regard to line breaks. I wouldn’t change a word of it—it is, it seems to me, a perfect poem.” 

“Tonight I Think My Body Is a Lake” by Mary Helen Callier was selected as the runner-up. McCrae writes, “What can I say? This poem is irresistible. At least, I can’t resist it. What I treasure most about it is its first stanza. There’s an awkwardness to the lines, as if they are both walking forward and stumbling as they walk. And then, all throughout the poem, the sense that terrors surround it, although the reader can’t see (most of ) them. It is a poem that requires the reader’s assent—it doesn’t overwhelm that reader. Rather, it asks the reader to trust it, and is willing to risk its own success on the reader’s response. I want to read more of the work of whoever wrote this poem.” 

Finalists for the 2024 contest in poetry were: Nick Martino, P. Scott Cunningham, Nanya Jhingran, Amogha —, Logan Klutse, Victoria Stitt, Emma De Lisle, Aria Curtis, and L. A. Johnson.