This July, the Sewanee Review will hold its eighth annual Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction contest. This year’s judges are Lauren Groff in fiction, Roger Reeves in creative nonfiction, and Cindy Juyoung Ok in poetry. More information about the contest, including submission guidelines, will be available on our Submittable page soon.

We received over 1,100 submissions last year. In addition to receiving $1,000 each, the winners were published in our Spring 2025 issue. 

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.”

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.”

John Jeremiah Sullivan chose Johanna Bissat’s essay “The Bandit” as last 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.”