The Winners of Our 2025 Literary Awards
The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction
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We are delighted to announce the winners of our 2025 literary competitions! Randall Mann has awarded the top Neruda Poetry Prize to Michael Lavers, for his poems “What Is” and “Darkness and Rain,” and Nancy Jooyoun Kim has awarded the top Porter Fiction Prize to Talia Neffson, for her story “Cenacolo.” The second-place winner in the poetry competition is Anna Lena Phillips Bell, for her poems “Undoing” and “Golden.” The finalists were A.M. Juster, for “Strip Mall Parking Lot,” and Alejandro Aguirre, for “A Fit of Krauts,” while the semifinalists were Maya Venters, for “If I Die by Volcano,” and Eliza Gilbert, for “Portrait of the Beast.” The second-place winner in the fiction competition is Mays Kuhail, for “Between the Seas.” The finalists were Madison Jozefiak, for “Raining in Dorchester,” and Ian VanDuzer, for “The Man-Eaters of Pakesley.” You can read their work in the Winter 2026 issue of Nimrod, which will also feature poems by Ernest Hilbert, Amit Majmudar, and Shane McCrae, a story by Jaia Hamid Bashir, an essay by Esther Allen, and much more. Our great thanks to our brilliant and generous judges, and to all those who sent us their poems and stories for consideration. Subscribe to Nimrod and keep your eyes peeled for announcements about the next submission windows and our awards reading! Below are the judges’ statements about the prize-winning poems and stories.
Randall Mann on Michael Lavers:
These poems have an easy formal mastery I admire, the lines elucidating yet undermining expectation, marked by little triumphs of pacing and invention. For example, the grievous, inescapable truths of “What Is,” where “Not everything is clear, but what is possible/ is possible, and we do not want to die”; and “Darkness and Rain,” gorgeous and emotional and clear-eyed, which might admit “I want to say Go on, take what I love,” but only if the subsequent line is “Just try.” The works are subversive and moving and searingly political. The precision, image by image, in these poems, unsettles.
Mann on Anna Lena Phillips Bell:
I love the economy yet fecundity of language in these poems, the sidelong wit and sense of wonder. My favorite of these is the villanelle “Undoing,” the scrupulous pleasures and refusals therian: the play and pathos “spools past,” slow but fast. And there is much to note in other poems too, the “style and stigma” of flowers; the unexpected elegy for a hat, a hat a proxy for us all as we inevitably fall apart. In knowing, winning ways, the poet transforms the everyday into a kind of open secret.
Nancy Jooyoun Kim on Talia Neffson:
Sondra, a “consumer, not a maker,” has always loved Mel, a troubled, talented young artist with a family history of addiction. These teenagers smoke cigarettes on fire escapes in varying states of hungoverness and hunger, devour bagels and pizza slices on New York City stoops, and talk for hours about the ways they, as girls, actually view and experience the world, a perspective that the canon has traditionally cared little about, or actively erased. These are outsiders who sometimes express love through corny inside jokes about art, developing their own kind of language of care and resilience, until one of them, and possibly both disappear into the circular stasis, the seductions and cruelties of history repeating itself.
In “Cenacolo,” an art historian and mother constructs an intimate portrait of an intense childhood friendship that couldn’t survive being a woman and the erasures on which adulthood is often built. This is a story of looking and being looked at as a girl and later a woman, and what it means to understand the self through art made by men—from Andy Warhol to Filippo Lippi—art that is also controlled and monitored, like the title’s Cenacolo at Ognissanti in Florence, open from “Monday and Thursday, nine to noon,” as precisely as women’s bodies and behaviors. In addition to its painterly selection of detail and color, from the greyness of bare feet after city walking in flip flops to the sfumato orange, the scar of a wildfire on a hill, what makes this short story quietly astound is its powerful unsettling examination of the porousness of memory for women still wet with the plaster of labor and loss.
Kim on Mays Kuhail:
Peter, Arlene, Sarah, Omar, and an unnamed narrator grew up going to Peter’s house in Kufr Aqab, a Jerusalem neighborhood, always bringing with them poppies, which “belong to the earth,” for his mother, Auntie Nahla. But now their identifications and permits separate how they can spend a day off–either by the scorchingly-uncomfortable Dead Sea or the glowing Mediterranean with its vendors and restaurants, minute-long sunsets in Yafa, where a checkpoint must be crossed in the sightline of new security cameras. Much goes unsaid by the three friends who splinter off from Omar and Sarah in order to escape from the oppressive heat as they ponder their obligations toward the two they’ve left behind. Should they say something to acknowledge what they’ve done? Have they actually committed anything that crosses the line or undermines their friendships at all? And if so, what kinds of tokens, from photographs to handmade bracelets, strings of shells, can they offer to their friends? Every option feels inadequate or wrong.
In “Between the Seas,” a quiet unsettling story carved by the grey emotional and moral borders drawn when documents define and circumscribe our experiences, a group of childhood friends, now adults, indulge in two very different, seemingly lighthearted outings by the sea. Friendships become fragmented through implicit and explicit constructions of hierarchy based on race and religion, culture, history and language, monitored by the state via license plates, permits, IDs. Turnstiles and security cameras make black and white declarations, and even adults, who once rode bikes together, played with stray cats as children, must remind each other not to run, lest they look suspicious.With its uncomplicated, direct prose in the present tense, this spare and elegant story deftly explores the Herculean emotional and moral contortions we all participate in when we deny or circumnavigate the center of what makes us essentially, and beautifully, the same.
— Boris Dralyuk, Hachi Chuku, and Stasha Cole
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