Announcing Our Winter 2026 Issue
The new NIMROD is in the mail...
Hachi Chuku, Stasha Cole, and I are thrilled to reveal the cover and contents of our Winter 2026 issue, which, as always, gathers poems and stories from around the world and presents the winners of our annual literary awards, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction. The window for submissions to those contests is open now. We will share some of the winning work in the current issue, along with other pieces, on our Substack in the weeks ahead, but the best way to explore all the riches between our covers—and to support us—is by subscribing today. We know you won’t regret it, and we thank you in advance.
Boris Dralyuk
Fiction
Talia Neffson: “Cenacolo”
Mays Kuhail: “Between the Seas”
Madison Jozefiak: “Raining in Dorchester”
Ian VanDuzer: “The Man-Eaters of Pakesley”
Jaia Hamid Bashir: “Two-Headed Animal”
Otis Fuqua: “Boy in Bus from Below”
Harriet Burns-Chalmers: “Codenames”
Poetry
Emma Bolden: “Political Science”
Rachel Hadas: “Ware of a World”
ShaneMcCrae: “Elizabethan Sonnet on He Recalls His Time as a Student Musician as He Talks About Bombing Iran”
Peter Vertacnik: “Last”
George Witte: “Long Distance Call to a Number No Longer in Service”
Michael Lavers: “What Is”; “Darkness and Rain”
Will Wells: “Midwestern Cornfield Late July”; “Real Estate”
Anna Lewis: “Battleground State”
Anna Lena Phillips Bell: “Undoing”; “Golden”
Mary Meriam: “Being”
John Poch: “April”
Christopher Childers: “The Weight”
Catullus, by E. J. Hutchinson: “101: Ave atque Vale”
A. M. Juster: “Strip Mall Parking Lot”
Alejandro Aguirre: “A Fit of Krauts”
Forester McClatchey: “Rain on Leaf”; “Question for the Dead”
J.C. Scharl: “Late August Garden”
Brooke Clark: “On Where You Are”
Jason Gordy Walker: “Charles Dexter, Pro Baseball Player, After the Iroquois Theater Fire”
Ernest Hilbert: “Dig”
Amit Majmudar: “Me Tangere”; “For Isaac Babel”
Moisei Fishbein, by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin: “A Musician, 1942”; “Dream”
Ruby Hansen Murray: “Speaking Native Books to Life”
Maya Venters: “If I Die by Volcano”
Eliza Gilbert: “Portrait of the Beast”
Brian Brodeur: “Veeries”
Malene Engelund “Let What Needs to Go Burn”
Melissa Balmain: “Interior Monologue in the Paper Goods Aisle”
Sunil Iyengar: “Reproach”
Erick Verran: “Hortus Conclusus”
Malcolm Greenlee Farley: “A Boy Gets Jolted at The Franklin Institute, 1976”
Eric T. Racher: “Herman Melville, Customs Inspector Number 75, New York City, 1871”
Criticism
Esther Allen: “Borges and Borges”
Got it! And a beautiful thing it is.