Announcing Winners and Finalists for the 2025 Editor’s Prizes

We are thrilled to announce the winners and finalists for our 2025 Editor’s Prizes in Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry! Winners receive publication and a thousand dollars each. Winning work will appear in THE FLORIDA REVIEW Vol. 49, No. 2, Spring 2026, on sale in March, 2026. All contest entrants receive a year’s subscription to the magazine.

2025 Editor’s Award for Fiction
WINNER:
Sharon Wahl: “Driving Lessons”
Sharon Wahl’s collection Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances (Iowa, 2024) won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was longlisted for the 2025 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her writing has appeared in publications including Harper’s, the Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Wigleaf. She’s online at www.sharonwahl.com.

FINALISTS:
Lara Palmqvist: “Bountiful”
Baird Harper: “Wreck of the Triumph”
Alan Sincic: “The Word”
Eric Rasmussen: “Warmer”
Sharon Solwitz: “Sex and History”
Katherine Cart: “Between the Floods”
Taylor Brown: “The Ghostbird”
Jake Winn: “The Last Resort”

2025 Editor’s Award for Creative Nonfiction
WINNER:
Sheree Chua: “Oralities: Sea, Salt and Bone”
Sheree Chua is an observer and occasional collaborator with the communities and tribes of the Philippine South, where she learns through shared stories and silences. She believes in listening as a form of care, and in the quiet strength of slow work.

FINALISTS:
Giovanni Wolfram: “Father Poem”
Rachel Rothenberg: “Variations on the Bodies Beneath our Feet”
Gustavo Pérez Firmat: “Car Trouble”
Heather Sellers: “We Are Never, Ever Getting Back to Normal”
Julie Marie Wade: “Kith, in the Aftermath”

2025 Editor’s Award for Poetry
WINNER:
Samuel Piccone: “Black Thumb”
Samuel Piccone is the author of the chapbook Pupa (Anhinga Press, 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Sycamore Review, Frontier Poetry, Washington Square Review, and RHINO. He serves as poetry editor at Raleigh Review, and is an assistant professor at Iowa State University.

FINALISTS:
“Ornament,” by Amy Raasch
“Twelve Songs of a Rural Queer,” by Cecilia Morris
“Pandemic Pantoum,” by Lauren Eggert-Crowe