2025 Creative Writing Prizes
The 2025 Creative Writing Prizes judge is Edie Meidav. Called an "American original," Edie Meidav is the author of Another Love Discourse (MIT Press), a lyric collaboration with photographer Cecile Bouchier, Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande), a collection of short fiction with a nonfiction coda, as well as these novels: Lola, California (FSG); Crawl Space (FSG), The Far Field: A Novel of Ceylon (Houghton). Her work has been recognized with the Bard Fiction Prize, the Kafka Prize for Best Novel, and year-end editors' picks, as well as support from the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, the Fulbright Program (Sri Lanka, Cyprus), the Howard Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and elsewhere. A senior editor at the journal Conjunctions, she is provost professor in the UMass Amherst MFA program, where she founded and advises the Radius MFA project. She has served as a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Leonard Award, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Juniper Prize, Howard, the PEN/Bingham Prize, Yaddo, and elsewhere, and believes greatly in the spark of originality she has already found very much alive here on the Dartmouth campus.
Sidney Cox Memorial Prize
Olivia Cao, "Along Family Lines" (poems)
Miguel Monjardim, "Summerborn" (poems)
Scott Sorenson, Poems
Honorable Mentions:
Eli Friedman, "The Future is What We Make It" (poem)
Devin Gifford, "Burden" (poem)
Saturn Guo, "Mourning Moon" (poems)
The Academy of American Poets Prize
Lauren Mills, Poems
Jacobson-Laing Award in Poetry
Loane Bouguennec, "Medley" (poems)
Maeve Kenney, Six Poems
Brooke Nind, "On Leaving" (poems)
The Mecklin Prize
Zoe Russell, "Hedge Maze"
Jonas Rosenthal, "Hic Sunt Dracones"
Michelle Mulé, "The Visible Histories"
Honorable Mentions:
Ella Charland, "Under the Big Top"
Will Elliott, "The Valley View"
Julia Lin, "Three Visits to my Grandmother"
Armita Mirkarimi, "Privilege of the Forest"
Vynateya Purimetla, "Into the Weeds"
Ava Razavi, "Jaded Grief"
The Grimes Prize
Anne Rhee, "The Origin Story of Loneliness" (poems)
Stephanie Sowa, "Ripple Effect" (story)
Zhuangzhuang Tan, "Doctor Fu: The Fishhole" (opening chapter)
Tia Walker, "Jim Crow" (poem)
Honorable Mentions:
Allison Burg, "breaking/growing" (poems)
Daniel Lampert, "sometimes I wish I didn't see things so clearly" (poem)
Alex Surprenant, "Hysteria in the middle of the day" (poem)
The Lockwood Prize
Wynn Johnson, "Rotting Fruit—Summer to Winter" (story)
Honorable Mentions:
Ellie Alloway, "An Irishman's guide to the occult" (chapter)
Ramsey Alsheikh, "Call to Prayer" (story)
Sophie Cohen, "One Milky Eye" (prose)
William C. Spengemann Award in Writing
Ella Grim, "Compost Sonnet" (poem)
Eloise Margaret Langan, "Dead dog's dead dog body in the dead dog body backyard" (poems)
Dankweli K. Mwaka, "Ruminations of a Zombie from the Kenyan Savvanah" (a collection of prose poetry)
Lauren Zhu, "Poetry Class" (poem)
Honorable Mentions:
Clay Socas, "Molting & Blooming" (poems)
Nicole Anaya Sosa, "What the Andes Shush, Sisters Remember" (poem)
Erskine Caldwell Prize
Paget Chung, "Gosari"
Jiho Lee, "Taste of Burning Sugar"
Honorable Mentions:
Will Elliott, "The Valley View"
Caitlin FitzMaurice, "Sense of Sound"
Claire Kovac, "Rosa & Ciri, Ciri & Rosa"
Adrienne Murr, "The Opposite of a Thing"
Sanjana Raj, "The Barge"