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 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.
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!
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 Review, The American Scholar, DIAGRAM, 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.
