2027 Best of the Net Nominees!
Please join us in celebrating our nominees for the 2027 Best of the Net anthology. These amazing artists contributed to Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and links to their work are attached below.
Fiction:
Elizabeth Chapman, What’s Left Behind
Elizabeth Chapman is a Florida native. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she teaches tiny humans to play the piano. This is her first published short story.
Matt Cashion, Please Pass the Flotsam
Matt Cashion’s fourth book, HOW WE DO THINGS HERE (a finalist in the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction) is forthcoming this February (Cornerstone Press). His story collection, LAST WORDS OF THE HOLY GHOST won the 2015 Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and his novel, OUR 13th DIVORCE, won the Edna Ferber Prize. Other work appears in The Sun, Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, Carolina Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Born in the North Carolina mountains and raised in Coastal Georgia, he earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and now teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.
Poetry:
Holly Zhou, Notes from Four-Tenths of a Daughter
Holly Zhou is a poet and mixed-media artist from the California desert, the unceded territory of the Cahuilla and Mojave peoples. Holly’s poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review and elsewhere. When not writing, they can be found exploring rocks by the ocean or in the mountains.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin, I Used to be Much Faster
Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of National Bestseller, The American Daughters, as well as The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You, a One Book One New Orleans selection, which was longlisted for the Story Prize. His debut, We Cast a Shadow, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the PEN America Open Book Prize. All three books were New York Times Editors’ Choice selections. Ruffin is the winner of the Iowa Review Award in fiction and the Louisiana Writer Award. Ruffin is an associate professor of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University.
Kelle Groom, A Garden at Night
Kelle Groom’s fifth poetry collection, The Book of Miracles, will be published in the Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2027. She is the author of four previous collections, Underwater City (University Press of Florida), Luckily, Five Kingdoms, and Spill (Anhinga Press); a memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), a Barnes & Noble Discover selection and New York Times Editors’ Choice; and How to Live: A Memoir in Essays (Tupelo Press). An NEA Fellow, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow, and winner of two Florida Book Awards in poetry, Groom’s work appears in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
Jill McCabe Johnson, Scientists Confirm the Biological Basis of Love
Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of two chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, most recently Tangled in Vow & Beseech (MoonPath, 2024), a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and Sally Albiso Poetry Award, plus the memoir Learning to Spar, forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Honors include Nautilus Awards in Poetry and Nature Writing, Longreads’ Best of 2021 Stories, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Artist Trust, and Hedgebrook. Recent works have been published in Fourth Genre, Terrain.org, Booth, and VerseDaily. Jill is editor-in-chief of Wandering Aengus Press and its imprint, Trail to Table Press.
Jacklin Farley (she/they, @svvanhilda on Instagram & BlueSky) holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida State University. Their work has most recently appeared / is forthcoming in Allium, The McNeese Review, Blood Orange Review, Gulf Stream, Diode Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. They enjoy clichés and long walks on the beach in Tallahassee (for now).
Emily Schulten, Ode to Missing Something You Never Had
Emily Schulten is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia, winner of the 2023 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her work appears in Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Five Points, among others. Schulten is the recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and a 2025-2026 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award and the current Poet Laureate of Key West, where she is a professor of English and creative writing and the director of CFK Poetics at The College of the Florida Keys.
Art:
Shruti Singh, The Garden of Adulthood Friendships
Shruti SIngh is a comic artist based in India. Her work captures the absurdities and the small, heartfelt struggles of modern existence; through hidden emotional lives of everyday things. You can follow her work on Instagram at @seriously_shruti.
Brianne Bannon, What My Hands Know
Brianne Bannon is a writer based in St. Louis, Missouri. She holds an M.A. in English from Saint Louis University.
Congrats and good luck to all out nominees!
