Announcing Winners and Finalists for the 2024 Editor’s Prizes
We are so excited to the winners and finalists for our 2024 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. 48, No. 2, Spring 2025, on sale in January, 2025.
2024 Editor’s Award for Fiction
WINNER:
Sophia Shealy: “Paradise”
Sophia Shealy received her MFA in Fiction from Florida State University. Her work has been published in Peatsmoke Journal and Pangyrus, and she was named a finalist for the Sewanee Review’s fifth annual Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction contest. You can find her on Instagram: @sophiashealy
FINALISTS:
Shastri Akella: “It Started With Stone”
Taylor Brown: “Rise, River, Rise”
Dominique Fong: “Angels in the Park”
Joshua Levy: “Wedding Rice”
Kirk Wilson: “Subtraction”
2024 Editor’s Award for Creative Nonfiction
WINNER:
Sienna Zeilinger: “Sorry About the Raccoons”
Sienna Zeilinger lives in Philadelphia and is originally from Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, CutBank, Real Life, Passages North, and elsewhere. Sienna’s work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Ohioana Library Association. She is an editor at Alien Magazine and Autofocus and a recent graduate of the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden. You can find her at siennazwrites.com. You can also find her on Instagram @siennazzz and
Twitter @siennazeilinger
FINALISTS:
Cory Brown: “Out in the Deep”
Asha Dore: “Florida Guns”
M.E. Macuaga: “Wild Blossoms”
Shane Neilson: “Chasing Goffman”
2024 Editor’s Award for Poetry
WINNER:
A. E. Wynter: “Inflatable Boys”
A. E. Wynter is a Black writer from New York. She currently lives in Saint Paul, MN, where she has curated multimedia art exhibits, readings, open mics, and online writing workshops, among other community events. Wynter has received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series. Her in-progress novel Far Cry From A Woman was a finalist in the 2021 Miami Fellowship for Emerging Writers, and she received first place in the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry. Other poems have appeared in West Trade Review and Water~Stone Review. Wynter was a 2023 resident at the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency. You can find her on Instagram@ashwritesprose
FINALISTS:
Leia Bradley: “Baby Blues”
Kristen Renee Miller: “Fear Not, For Your Names Are Written in the Eternal Scroll”
Merlin Ural Rivera: “Angelus Novus”
