The 2026 Short Story Readings event were held 6:30 pm on Thursday, October 8 at Rockville Memorial Library. At this event, the winners of the Short Story Contest were honored and read their work.
The story citations below are by reviewer Nate Brown
Adult Winners (available via the story’s link) :
First Place: Leslie Spitz-Edson (“Fireflies“)
Leslie Spitz-Edson’s “Fireflies” is a masterclass in breaking many of the so-called “rules” you might come across in any well-meaning writing workshop:
Aim for unity of time, and don’t move back and forth between timelines in a story. You could confuse or lose your reader.
Don’t write from the perspective of a very young or very old person.
If you’re writing domestic naturalism, you should keep the prose tidy, terse, and relatively free of figurative language.
If you’re writing toward the spectacular, let your prose grow leggy and florid.
When it comes to making art and writing stories, blind adherence to somebody else’s rules leads to a literary culture that takes few risks and offers even fewer surprises to readers. In her beautifully lyrical short story “Fireflies,” Leslie Spitz-Edson deftly shifts her elderly protagonist, Anna’s, attention from the most extant problems of her day to a riverine past that, to her, is just as accessible and potent as her present moment. Like us, Anna’s present is composed both of her day-to-day concerns and of moments from the past that seem to rear their heads whether she wants them to or not.
Spitz-Edson moves swiftly and decisively from Anna’s memories of a violent storm and a lighting stuck oak to the troubling departure of a long-lost sibling and then to a tender memory of harvesting vegetables directly from the garden bed. Like an intricate mosaic, “Fireflies” is enrapturing both in its component parts (at the level of the sentence) and taken as a whole. Only a story as finely crafted as this one can so easily thwart common writing conventions, leaving we readers to ask ourselves why those conventions exist in the first place.
Like all great stories, “Fireflies” doesn’t just entertain us and wow us with its prose style—those it does both—and it doesn’t just recount the play-by-play of its protagonist’s life. Instead, the writing demands that we readers reconsider the permeable boundaries between past and present while also and more subtly demonstrating that the often-well-meaning bits of conventional writerly wisdom are by no means ironclad. I’d go so far as to suggest that had Spitz-Edson adhered to something like unity of time, action, and place, this story wouldn’t punch us in the gut as surely as it does. And for those of us who like our domestic fiction to both kiss us on the cheek and slap us in the face, that’d have been an aesthetic and readerly loss. As it stands, however, “Fireflies” is a remarkable and innovative tale that presents pain, reverie, regret, determination, loss, love, revenge, and memory in all of their messy, troubling, and nuanced glory.
Finalists: Fiona J. Mackintosh (“Absent Without Leave“)
Some of our best war stories are not about war, pe se, but are instead about the domestic ramifications of war. In “Absent Without Leave” by Fiona J. Mackintosh, Curt has walked off his assigned Navy base and trekked his way from Seattle to Coconut Grove, Florida, by way of his hometown of Baltimore, where he finds himself adrift. Technically a fugitive, he spends his days musing about his potential future, forms a relationship with a kindly neighbor, Janine, and worries about whether he’s overstaying his welcome on his cousin’s couch.
Some stories create narrative tension with massive turns in the plot, while others are broodier and more subtle expressions of the human heart. What Mackintosh offers in “Absent Without Leave” is a meditation not on the horrors of war but instead examines what war takes from a person. In this case, Curt’s deployment to South Pacific has left him unable to imagine a future for himself. Just as he is maddened by his inability to see the sky from the dark belly of an aircraft carrier, Curt returns to the United States only to find himself holed up in his cousin’s apartment, unable to move forward or make plans. And it’s this terrible tension—Curt’s inability to imagine a possible future for himself—that lands so heavily in the reader’s lap. Here is a young man adrift, shunned by his parents for going AWOL, and unable, at first, to even turn himself into the authorities.
This is deft, serious, and beautiful writing, and proof that not all stories are driven by deaths in the family and massive explosions or epic narrative surprises. What’s offered here is more like an intimate letter where the reader feels no small privilege in witnessing Curt’s thoughts and feelings, leading us to hope—as Curt himself does—that one day he might land on his feet.
Marina Koestler Ruben (“Licking“)
As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, Marina Koestler Ruben’s “Licking” struck a particular chord with me, though I know the story’s appeal is not limited to my particular demographic. Any writer can tell you children pose a particular problem for storytellers and novelists. Inevitably, a child character will be accused by a reader or a critic of seeming too old or too young for their stated age, or a reader will flag an action or a line of dialogue as either too advanced or too simple to be credible. But in Ruben’s steady hand, this deft little story of a day in an elementary school turns into a portrait of anxiety that’s as potent as it is poignant. It’s also a story that depicts a different era, one that I’m loath to think of as distant, though of course it is. The world she presents in “Licking” could be my very own second-grade classroom, and Mrs. Lavoie my very own elementary school teacher.
Which is to say this: Some writers present fantastical worlds and characters that introduce us to new ideas, new ways of thinking and feeling, and novel circumstances built out of the writer’s raw imagination. Other writers deploy their imaginations to recapture the past and remind us of our own youthful folly, optimism, frailty, joy, and hope. “Licking” is the latter kind of story, one that set me firmly back into my own second grade classroom and left me wondering how any of us were ever quite so young.
Student Winners:
First Place: Shriya Sharma (“Chanda Hain Tu“)
Shriya Sharma’s “Chanda Hain Tu” tells the story of an American Dream as it’s understood during our strained and fractured era. Her protagonist, a young first-generation American, recounts stories from her own immigrant mother’s youth and depicts the citizenship ceremonies of each of her parents. Often, citizenship ceremonies are assumed to be cause for celebration, but in “Chanda Hain Tu,” Shriya Sharma delves into the ethical and interpersonal complications of becoming an American in an era at least party defined by rising white nationalism, Trump-era federal cuts, and general right-wing antipathy to immigrants and immigration. That any author could so deftly depict the complications of our age is a miracle; that this author is a young person should not surprise us. Who, after all, are better truth tellers than the young? And who’s got the most at stake when considering the direction of the nation than our nation’s youth? All of which is to say: this year’s winner has held a mirror up to domestic American life and has shown us that through our dedication to our ideals and to one another, we might just make it through this strained and awful moment yet—and that there is, in spite of the troubles of the world, so much good yet to be done.
Finalists: Austin Stump Manning (“It All Started with the Little Blond Girl with Pigtails“)
The world feeds our fiction, and by encountering fictive versions of our world on the page, we readers are better able to understand the world at large. The real world. In “It All Started with a Little Blonde Girl with Pigtails,” Austin Stump Manning shows us America as it stands approximately 1,000 years in the future. Her cyborg protagonist has been enlisted to further an ethnic cleansing campaign that will strike readers as all too familiar. Here, as in so much else, everything that’s old is new again: The world has been divided into the powerful and bigoted haves and the minoritized and vilanized have-nots. Still, for as bleak as Stump Manning’s vision of the future may be, not all is lost. Through diary entries, we learn that the story’s protagonist has lost so much: his humanity, his name, his family connections and friends. Still, his moral compass remains, and as he writes to his diary, he discovers that the evil hegemon that controls his life is not, in fact, infallible. And it’s this fact that keeps we readers safe from despair. Even in a future ruled by oligarchical bigots, the human desire for equality and inclusion reigns supreme, and while Manning’s cyborg has a steep hill to climb at the story’s end, we readers can rest assured that the righteous will ultimately come out on top.
Sebastian Ko (“The Detox“)
Every now and again, a story is so fresh and strange and delightful that you know it’s going to stick with you. Like the skin of a popcorn kernel adhered to a tooth, there’s a moment in “The Detox” by Sebastian Ko, that I’ll be troubling over for a long time to come. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so let me just say this: Who knew a story in which a protagonist goes to extreme lengths to steal a cellphone in order to delete a misdirected and vicious text message could be this much fun? Did I want the story’s protagonist, Elliott, to punch that peaceful Buddhist monk? Not necessarily. Did I want the protagonist’s evil boss to find inner peace? Definitely not. And while it’s hard to say whether, by the story’s ending, Elliott has come out ahead or not, one thing is certain here: “The Detox” is at once the most absurd story I’ve read in a decade of judging this prize, but it’s also legitimately hilarious. Humor is hard to pull off in real life, and it’s even harder to accomplish on the page. Here, Sebastian Ko’s humor is both outlandish and delightful, which is no small feat for any writer, and I was roundly impressed.
William Campbell was a featured speaker at the Short Story Awards event. Our adult contest winner in 2022,
Bill is a retired U.S. Army colonel, neurologist, award‑winning author, watercolor artist, and philanthropist, who currently resides in Richmond, Virginia. His creative writing began with short stories inspired by memorable patients from nearly five decades of neurology practice His work has appeared in The Sherwood Forest Art and Literary Review, As You Were: The Military Review, Ink In Thirds, Five Minutes, and The Glint Literary Journal. His recent novel, Soldier for the Union, is a historically rich Civil War fiction set during General Grant’s Overland Campaign in 1864. The story blends war narrative with themes of courage, self‑sacrifice, and the hidden history of women who fought in the Civil War.
Nate Brown is a writer, editor, and visual artist whose work spans creative writing, literary publishing, community-engaged pedagogy, visual art and culture, and environmental storytelling. He joined the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University in 2022 after teaching fiction and creative nonfiction for five years in the university’s Writing Seminars. Currently, he serves as Associate Director for Campus and Community Outreach at the Johns Hopkins Writing Center and coordinates the university’s Common Question, an interdisciplinary initiative fostering intellectual inquiry and conversation across the Hopkins community.
