Fellow

Sydney Mayes

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. She is the winner of the 2025 Adrienne Rich Award and the inaugural ONLY POEMS Poet of the Year. Her poems have been published in The Atlantic, Poets.org, The Hopkins Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Kenyon Review, among other publications. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Mayes has received scholarships and support from Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Community of Writers, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her prose is forthcoming in the anthology Between Our Legs: Silence-Breaking Stories on Gynecological Health, published by the University of Iowa Press.

William Hawkins has been published in Granta, ZZYZYVA and TriQuarterly, among others. Originally from Louisiana, he currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is at work on a novel and posts irregularly on oncetherewas.substack.com.

Tassity Johnson is from Houston, Texas, and lives in Washington, DC. Her fiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail. She graduated from Duke University, where she studied literature and cultural theory, and Yale Law School. She is working on a story collection and a novel. 

Young Rader lives and writes in Berlin. His work appears in the Chicago Review, Gulf Coast, Little Star, New England Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, swamp pink, and other publications. His stories have been shortlisted for the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize and the Berlin Writing Prize. He was the 2023 winner of the Calvino Prize. He is at work on a novel and a short story collection. 

Maggie Wang is interested in intertextuality, the environment, and the absurd. She is the author of the chapbook The Sun on the Tip of a Snail’s Shell (Hazel Press, 2022).

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers (selected as one of the best books of 2018 by The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, and The Spectator), and The Ferrante Letters (winner of the 2021 PROSE award for literature). She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and head of special projects at The New York Review of Books. 

Victoria Chang is the author of the poetry collections With My Back to the World (winner of the Forward Prize), The Trees Witness Everything, and Obit (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize), and the nonfiction book Dear Memory. Chang has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and the director of Poetry@Tech.

Elisa Gonzalez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection, Grand Tour, was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker. A former Fulbright scholar, she has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Whiting Award, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Levis Reading Prize, and was a finalist for the 2025 Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. A novel and a nonfiction book are also forthcoming from FSG.

Fellow

María José Candela

María José Candela is a writer from Colombia. Selected as the runner-up for the 2022 Sewanee Review Fiction Prize and the winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Fiction Prize, her fiction has also appeared in the Kenyon Review. Her nonfiction has been published by Roxane Gay. She holds a BA from Vassar College, and an MFA. from Florida State University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Spanish Literature at Georgetown University. She is working on her first book.

Finalists

Amanda Mei Kim
Dominica Phetteplace
Cassandra Quayson
Katana Smith

Judges

Hanif Abdurraqib
Maya Binyam
Shane McCrae

Fellow

Roland Jackson

Roland Jackson received his MFA from the University of Montana and is a 2023 fellow with the Periplus Collective. His short stories “Martial Artists” and “Hunting, Late Season, Bow” can be found in Passages North and Wisconsin People & Ideas, respectively. An arborist by trade, he lives and writes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and kiddo. He is writing his first novel.

Finalists

Anthony Hudson
Erica Frederick
Sarina Romero
Bradley Trumpfheller

Judges

R. O. Kwon
Maureen McLane
Justin Torres

Fellow

Addie E. Citchens

Addie E. Citchens was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Oxford American’s “Best of the South,” Midnight & Indigo’s speculative fiction anthology, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on The Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize. Her first novel, Dominion, was published by FSG in August 2025.

Finalists

Bianca Asare
Min Li Chan
Peter Zaragoza Mayshle
Dominica Phetteplace

Judges

Sheila Heti
Katie Kitamura
Rowan Ricardo Phillips