News

Open Season Awards: Winners for 2025

Georgio Russell (poetry), "Anxiety Attack"
Catherine St. Denis (fiction), "Bubble Bath and the Ecstasy of Diminishment"
Tanis MacDonald (creative nonfiction), "Singularity Packet"

Congratulations to all three writers, who have each won $2,000 in prize money and publication in our upcoming spring issue #230. Look for interviews with the winners in our April newsletter. Keep reading for comments from the judges and to learn more about the contest winners!

Poetry

Poetry contest judge Matthew Hollett had this to say about Georgio Russell's winning poem:

"From its precipitous first line, 'Anxiety Attack' plunges through hospital cords and tree branches into a complex untangling of memory and absolution. Each propulsive couplet cracks our window of understanding a little wider than before, as the poem builds in tension and complexity. I particularly loved the inventive, visceral language ('our pores / like gorging mouths,' 'the wet taser of my nerves'). This poem is diamond-sharp, both contemplative and fierce—a dazzling assertion of being."

Georgio Russell

Georgio Russell is a Bahamian writer and an alumnus of the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, as well as the Obsidian Foundation and the Undocupoets Fellowship. He is currently supported by the Toronto Arts Council, and was shortlisted for the PEN Canada New Voices Award (2024). He is a past winner of the Peepal Tree Press Prize (2019), the Mervyn Morris Prize (2020), The Editors’ Prize for Magma Poetry (2023), and the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry (2024). He was shortlisted for the Frontier OPEN Prize (2022 and 2023), the Oxford Poetry Prize (2023), and ARC’s Poem of The Year contest (2024). He was also long-listed for the National Poetry Competition (2022) held by the Poetry Society. His work has been published in Frontier Poetry, The London Magazine, Lolwe, Cordite, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review and elsewhere. He has poems forthcoming in Nimrod International and POETRY Magazine.

Fiction

Fiction contest judge Corinna Chong had this to say about Catherine St. Denis' winning story:

"'Bubble Bath and the Ecstasy of Diminishment' is a confidently written and gut-punchingly honest story about the complicated and even toxic relationships young women harbour with each other and with their own bodies in contemporary society. The prose moves with compelling urgency, each scene rendered with remarkable clarity and skewered by sharp details that lend vitality and complexity to the protagonist’s private struggle: 'a scribble of elbows and flying hair' marks a formative memory of a schoolyard fight; scars of self-harm 'lie like barcodes on her inner arms'; and 'droplets of her blood bloom like crimson jellyfish in the half-full sink.' Sentence by sentence, the story resonates with profound and aching truth. It’s a deeply unsettling but vital read that commands attention from the first sentence to the last."

Catherine St. Denis

Catherine St. Denis (she/her) lives, writes, sings, teaches, and parents on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen peoples in Victoria, BC. Her work previously appeared in Rattle, The Malahat Review (issue 221), Grain, Arc, Canthius, and The Humber Literary Review. Once shortlisted and twice longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, she has also been shortlisted for the Far Horizons Award for Poetry, The Fiddlehead's Poetry Prize, The Toronto Arts and Letters Club Award, and The Foster Poetry Prize. Catherine was a finalist for PEN Canada's New Voices Award in both 2022 and 2023. Her work is featured in Biblioasis’ Best Canadian Poetry 2025.

Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction judge Sadiqa de Meijer had this to say about Tanis MacDonald's winning piece:

"'Singularity Packet' is a linguistically innovative essay that proceeds organically, sentence by unpredictable sentence, through the complexities of its subject. The narrator directly addresses their unknown ancestors in a voice that holds the polarities of being unsentimental and heartfelt, conversational and poetic. By the end, their articulations have formed a jagged, kaleidoscopic whole, and the implied void is a space of possibility in which the absent presence is the reader. "

Tanis MacDonald

Tanis MacDonald is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022) and six other books. She teaches at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl is forthcoming from Book*hug Press.

 




All three winning pieces will be published in issue #230, spring 2025, circulating in May.

We would also like to congratulate those who were shortlisted for the 2025 Open Season Awards:

In POETRY:

David Barrick, Simon Peter Eggertsen, Sadie McCarney, Khashayar Mohammadi, Jordan Mounteer, Warsha Mushtaq, Ayda Niknami, Lena Palacios, and Ellie Sawatzky

In FICTION:

Anne Baldo, Jenna Butler, Morgan Charles, Francine Cunningham, Michael Kissinger, Alex Kitt, Trent Lewin, Amara Sinha, and Barbara Tran

In CREATIVE NONFICTION:

Jenna Butler, Gillian Der, Meghan Fandrich, Chance Freihaut, Madonna Hamel, Jane Kirby, and Erin Scott


Thank you to all who entered for your support of our contest and the magazine. Many thanks also to contest judges Corinna Chong (fiction), Sadiqa de Meijer (cnf), and Matthew Hollett (poetry), as well as all of our valued staff and volunteers.