Winners are listed below, with comments from reviewer Nate Brown. Congratulations!
2025 ADULT WINNER
January Light
By L.V. Pires
“I knew that there was no other story for her in this moment. This was the only one. This was the truest one. This was the one that she could not escape.”
Lines like this are vivid and beautiful, and this story is filled with similar moments them. This is such a lovely, subtle story, one with a darkness at its heart that is amazingly countered by the story’s artful and deeply felt depiction of maternal love. This danger of the father figure is palpable, but the protagonist’s enduring belief in the power of story offers her–and we readers–hope. Kudos on this wonderful story.
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2025 STUDENT WINNER
Cardinal
By Anushkka Shukla
A wildly imaginative but all-too-plausible speculative story that raises important questions about the limits of technology, the right to privacy, and the importance of feeling deeply in order to retain your humanity. Because the writer subtly builds this world, readers are drawn in, perhaps imagining their own teenage years (with all of its wonderfulness and weirdness and awfulness and nonsense) and what it felt like to mature emotionally. Or maybe we look around at contemporary technologies that, while efficient, feel a little heartless, a little robotic. This story is just the opposite: filled with original thinking, complex ethical considerations, and imaginative and subtle world building, “Cardinal,” is, in other words, an impressive contemporary work of speculative fiction that presents a scary vision of the near future even as it reminds us of the importance of truly trying to see and know the ones we love.
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2025 ADULT FINALIST
Couch
By Melissa Ferguson
“All those lonely women and their power over us cornered girls fueling into our Hail Marys any whiff of distraught, our fear of damnation, our forbidden words. What if all those ladies—the stooped and the bawdy, and girls in jumpers and white tights, too—let loose our tongues and stood up for ourselves, wouldn’t we all break open? Scares me to this living day. “
Moments like this are what great fiction are made of. You swing for the fences here rhetorically and narratively, and there’s a huge payoff: this is both meaningful, engaging, and thoughtful while also being very entertaining. You do a wonderful job in this story of building tension, which makes the ending all that much better. Very nice work!
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2025 STUDENT FINALISTS
A Story Before You Go
By Alina Admin
A wonderfully told story that’s both philosophically engaging and entertaining! This story smartly uses books as a metaphor for the population and death as an insatiable reader working his way through the library. The story feels fresh and original to me even as it absolutely captures the tone and style of a classic thriller tale. This is impressive writing!
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Echoes From the Deep
By Yuen Cao
If Jaws made me scared to swim in the ocean, then “Echoes from the Deep” has likely turned me away from ever even thinking about taking a scuba diving lesson. This story is a true action thriller that’s wonderfully paced and so much fun to read. The ending’s ambiguity adds to the story’s mystique and compelled me to go back to the beginning to read it again. Nice writing!
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2025 STUDENT HONORABLE MENTIONS
