2026 Best of the Net Nominees

Please join us in celebrating our nominees for the 2026 Best of the Net anthology. These amazing artists contributed to Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and links to their work are attached below.

 

Fiction:
Andrew Brininstool, “Slowdeatha”

Andrew Brininstool is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in prose as well as a finalist for a PEN / Writing for Justice fellowship. His other work has appeared in The Southern Review, VICE, Millions, Tin House, and Best New American Voices. He was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His first work of nonfiction, High Desert Blood, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.

Kira Compton, “(the sound of children screaming has been removed)”

Kira Compton is bad at writing bios, as well as several more important things. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Boise State, where she serves as the associate editor of the Idaho Review. She is a proud member of the Hemingway Society and presented at the international conference this summer. Her writing has been published in the Saranac Review, hex literary, Creative Nonfiction, Into the Void, and others. Stalk her professional life at kiracompton.com and her personal life @kirajcompton.

 

Creative Nonfiction:
Juliana Gray, “The Art of Murder”

Juliana Gray’s most recent poetry collection is Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press, 2017). Her essays have appeared in West Branch, The Hopkins Review, CutBank, and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.

Ygor Noblott, “101 Steps to Becoming an American”

Ygor Noblott is a Venezuelan-American writer with too many words and not enough pages. He has a B.A. in Writing & Rhetoric Studies from The University of Utah and a small assortment of poems and essays scattered across the literary world. He’s also self-published two poetry collections with more in the works. He lives in Salt Lake City with his two wonderful children.

 

Art:
Laura Chow Reeve, “Coming Home to Roost”

Laura Chow Reeve is the author of the short story collection A Small Apocalypse. Her writing and graphic work can be found in The Offing, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Catapult, Joyland, and elsewhere. She is a winner of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and was a Blackburn Fellow at the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Richmond, VA.

 

Poetry:
Michael Chang, “Confessional”

Michael Chang (they/them) is the author of many volumes of poetry, including TOY SOLDIERS (Action, Spectacle, 2024), THINGS A BRIGHT BOY CAN DO (Coach House Books, 2025) & HEROES (845 Press, 2025).

Erica Dawson, “Sonnet for trigger → obsessional doubt → consequence”

Erica Dawson is a Black neurodivergent poet living in the Baltimore-DC area. The author of three books of poetry, most recently When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018), her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Libre, Orion, Revel, Shō Poetry Journal, The Believer, and other journals and anthologies.

Joe Wilkins, “Elegy Ending with a Slice of Sour-Cream-and-Raisin Pie”

Joe Wilkins is the author of the novels The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die, both of which have garnered wide critical acclaim. He is also the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including Thieve and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, Wilkins lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University. His latest collection of poems, Pastoral, 1994, is forthcoming from River River Books in January 2025.

Jane Zwart, “Used Benison”

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in Fall 2025.

Shann Ray & James Black, “Brother My Brother”

Both Cheyenne and Arapaho, artist James Black is a Southern Cheyenne Sundance priest and ledger artist. A descendent of Black Kettle, the renowned Cheyenne peace chief, and two of the original Fort Marion ledger artists of the 1800s, Cohoe and Making Medicine, through his art James honors his people today.

American Book Award winner Shann Ray teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University, and poetry for Stanford and the Center for Contemplative Leadership at Princeton Theological Seminary. Czech American, he grew up near Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne reservation.

Edmund White, “GIOVANNI”

We’d like to extend our deepest condolences to the family of Edmund White, who passed away earlier this year. He was 85 years old. The Florida Review submits his poem “GIOVANNI” not only for its emotional gravitas, but also in Edmund’s loving memory.

Edmund White has written some thirty books. He is perhaps best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. He has written brief lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud and a book about unconventional Paris called The Flaneur. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and has received a medal from the French Academy. He taught at Princeton and lives in New York City. He won the 2018 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and received the 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. His sex memoir, The Loves of My Life, will be published in January, 2025.

 

Congrats and good luck to all of our nominees!

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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”

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Introducing Creative Nonfiction Editor Brendan Stephens

We are thrilled to introduce Brendan Stephens as our new online Creative Nonfiction editor for Aquifer!

Brendan Stephens is a writer and educator from Appalachia. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The PinchEpochthe Southeast ReviewCleaver Magazine, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His awards include multiple Inprint Donald Barthelme awards, an Into the Void Fiction Prize, a Sequestrum Emerging Writer Award, and inclusion in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. He earned his Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston and an MFA from the University of Central Florida. Currently, he is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University and a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.

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2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award Winner!

We are thrilled to announce that Kate Osana Simonian is our 2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Chapbook Award Winner! Her chapbook, The Screw, will be published and available to purchase in March 2025. 

Kate Osana Simonian is an Armenian-Australian writer, and she’s currently an assistant professor at California State University, San Bernardino. Her work has been published in the Pushcart Anthology, Chicago Tribune, Iowa Review, and Best Australian Stories, and she’s received various accolades including the Nelson Algren Award, a John Steinbeck Fellowship, and a California Arts Council Emerging Writer Grant. Kate lives with her partner and two delightful cats, who are helping her to finish her first novel, Singleton. Ask her about it! Or check her out at katesimonian.com.

About The Screw, from judge Mark Polanzak:

The Screw is a super tight, dazzling novella about a young woman lured into an abusive relationship with a common monster of a boyfriend. The protagonist—a second-person “You”—seems to be following instructions from an internal authority that dictates how to succeed at failure. But this real-life horror story of insidious psychological abuse is told with stunning wit and innovation. This novella evokes Ann Beattie and Ottessa Moshfegh, but the writing has a velocity all its own.

The Screw is a page-turner for its sentences as much as its storyline. Because of the whip-smart humor and consistently fresh way this tale is spun, I felt a rare joyful discomfort while reading about the creeping control the abuser takes from our protagonist. The Screw manages to do what fiction should: submerge the reader in an experience rather than tell them about one.

 


About the judge for the 2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award, Mark Polanzak:

Mark Polanzak is the author of the hybrid work POP! (Stillhouse) and the story collection, The OK End of Funny Town (BOA Editions), which won the BOA Short Fiction Prize. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Southern ReviewThe American ScholarDIAGRAM, and anthologized in Best American Nonrequired Reading. Mark co-founded the literary magazine, draft: the journal of process, and co-produced the podcast, The Fail Safe. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA Program in Fiction, Mark teaches creative writing, literature, and podcasting at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He lives in Rhode Island.

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2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award Finalists

We are so excited to announce the finalists for our 2023-2024 Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award!

Mary Kate Coleman, “Wednesday Trash Day”

Will Musgrove, “After Last Call”

Kate Osana Simonian, “The Screw”

Each year, The Florida Review honors former editor Jeanne Leiby with the publication of a prose or graphic narrative chapbook. To purchase one of our previous winners’ chapbooks, please see our Store, and for more information about Jeanne Leiby, the award in her honor, and previous chapbook winners and finalists, please see our Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Series page.

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