Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2025
Summer 2025: Poetry
THE LAND OF MULBERRIES
by Zuhra Malik
Winner of the 2024 Banyan Review Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by August 31
The Banyan Review is an international online journal promoting poetry, art, and the natural world. This prize gives $1,000 and publication. Malik's winning prose-poem is a wistful fairy tale about an unnamed village that is poor in everything but fruit, love, and imagination.
NEITHER/NOR
by Alleliah Nuguid
Winner of the 2023 Dynamo Verlag Book Contest
Entries must be received by August 31
This biennial award (odd-numbered years only) gives $1,000 and publication for a book-length manuscript of prose, poetry, or hybrid work. All genres compete together. Nuguid's poetry collection A Human Moon was the most recent winner. In this poetic fable, a bat refuses to fight in the war between birds and beasts, only to find that neither side accepts them as a hybrid creature in a binary world.
FIGURE EIGHT
by Daniel Moysaenko
Winner of the 2025 Academy of American Poets First Book Award
Entries must be received by September 1
This prestigious award for a manuscript by authors with no published full-length books gives $5,000 and publication by Graywolf Press. Moysaenko's Overtakelessness was the most recent winner. In this poem's brief but harrowing list of wartime sights, one feels terror long before it is explicitly mentioned, and the reader is left to wonder whether the child's dance is a sign of hope or lunacy.
DARK TOURISM
by Amanda Hodes
Winner of the 2024 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
California State University Fresno offers this open poetry manuscript contest with a prize of $2,000 and publication by Black Lawrence Press. Hodes' book Into the Into of Earth Itself was the most recent winner. In this elegiac poem, named for the practice of visiting disaster sites as travel attractions, the focus is Centralia, PA, where underground fires from abandoned mines are still burning.
Spring 2025: Fiction and Nonfiction
JUMPING OFF
by Ginger Pinholster
Winner of the 2024 Prime Number Magazine Award for Short Fiction
Entries must be received by March 31
This $1,000 prize includes publication in Prime Number Magazine, an online journal from Press 53. Grotesque comedy and high moral stakes coexist in this prizewinning story about an orphaned young woman trying to stay afloat, financially and literally.
FALLING
by Hadley Franklin
Winner of the 2023 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize
Entries must be received by April 13
This prize sponsored by a Madrid bookstore gives 2,000 euros, a writing residence in Italy, and the opportunity for the winner and shortlisted entries to be published in a variety of literary magazines. Franklin's prizewinning story, subsequently published in The London Magazine, features a college student navigating complex reactions to her boyfriend's death and the attention that it brings her.
TO THOSE AFFECTED BY MY ACTIONS
by Emily Ver Steeg
Winner of the Fall 2024 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
Entries must be received by April 30
This twice-yearly contest gives prizes up to $1,500 and publication in the online magazine The Ghost Story for short stories with paranormal, supernatural, or magical realism elements. In this unsettling tale, a crematorium worker has second thoughts about their profession after an apparent revelation from God.
