Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Something New Under the Sun, a New York Times Notable Book, Intimations, and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, which won the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize. She has received support from the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy in Berlin, the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi, and Bread Loaf. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Paris Review, VOGUE, n+1, and Tin House. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. 

Elisa Gabbert is a poet and nonfiction writer whose books include Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2026.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, House of Lords and Commons, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, and School of Instructions. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Writers Award, and a Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, among other honors. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

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, ZYZZYVA 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).

Fellow

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