2024-2025 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award Winner!

“Gutting and necessary. A grief so delicate and rending that it feels holy. There’s no balm for the wound this book will leave in you.” – Contest Judge Micah Dean Hicks

The Florida Review is thrilled to announce our winner for the 2024-2025 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award, Mary Kate Coleman! Her chapbook Wednesday Trash Day will be published and available for purchase in early 2026.

About the author:

Mary Kate Coleman is a Fulbright scholar and has served as an investigator on the digital storytelling project Humanizing Deportation. She’s a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Carve Magazine, Redivider, and Midwestern Gothic. Her essay “Wednesday Trash Day” is the winner of the 2025 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award.

Meet the 2024-2025 contest judge, Micah Dean Hicks:

Micah Dean Hicks is the author of the novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, and the story collection Electricity and Other Dreams. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, has been awarded the Calvino Prize, and is a two-time finalist for the Nelson Algren Award. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Hicks grew up in rural southwest Arkansas and now lives in Tampa.