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2025 Open Season Awards Shorlists

We're pleased to announce the shortlists for our 2025 Open Season Awards!

The winner in each category will be announced on January 17.

In Poetry:

David Barrick, "Follow the Leader (Sudbury, 1999)"
Simon Peter Eggertsen, "So Matthias and Hannah would know, my father sketches out their immediate ancestry, threads the space-time continuum"
Sadie McCarney, "West Side Story" and "Letter to a Friend from the Library Sidewalk"
Khashayar Mohammadi, "Luminous without an other" and "Solo Travels"
Jordan Mounteer, "Drought Survivability"
Warsha Mushtaq, "There Are No Kinnow in Amrika"
Ayda Niknami, "the weary matriarch"
Lena Palacios, "Shitty Sonnets or Not Another Decolonial Love Poem"
Georgio Russell, "Anxiety Attack" and "Quietus"
Ellie Sawatzky, "To My Great-Great-Grandfather"

In Fiction:

Anne Baldo, "How Far Should You Go"
Jenna Butler, "The Impossible People"
Morgan Charles, "Knife Skills"
Francine Cunningham, "Dinosaur sludge and tree bones are feeling the end times"
Michael Kissinger, "Nervous Pig, Dreaming Pig"
Alex Kitt, "As Ladybugs Lie"
Trent Lewin, "it gets bigger."
Amara Sinha, "Walking to Burma"
Catherine St. Denis, "Bubble Bath and the Ecstasy of Diminishment"
Barbara Tran, "Eating Rich"

In Creative Nonfiction:

Jenna Butler, "Fugitive Blue"
Gillian Der, "Third Child"
Meghan Fandrich, "Ashes"
Chance Freihaut, "Cigarettes & Iguanodons"
Madonna Hamel, "What I Wore to Your Funeral"
Jane Kirby, "XIV Temperance"
Tanis MacDonald, "Singularity Packet"
Erin Scott, "On being left"

Thank you to contest judges Corinna Chong (fiction), Sadiqa de Meijer (cnf), and Matthew Hollett (poetry). And a special thank you to all who entered the contest. Best of luck to those shortlisted!