Winning Words: A Reading with the 2025 BLR Prizewinners
ABOUT THE EVENT:
Join us to celebrate the publication of BLR's latest issue and meet the winners of the 2025 BLR Literary Prizes. Our winners — Pia Jee-Hae Baur, Fiona Ennis, and Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador — will read from their winning work and be interviewed by BLR editors.
This will be an online event on April 30 at 7:00 pm ET. (Please RSVP even if you can't make it then; we'll send you an email the next day with the link, which will stay active afterward.)
2025 BLR PRIZEWINNERS:
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"EVERY DAY ANEW" by PIA JEE-HAE BAUR Winner of the Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction Selected by Esmé Weijun Wang Pia will read from her winning essay and be in conversation with Alanna Weissman, BLR assistant nonfiction editor. Pia Jee-Hae Baur is a writer born to German and Korean parents and raised in the United States. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana in Missoula. She lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. |
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"THE VEIL THINS" by FIONA ENNIS Winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction Selected by Wayétu Moore Fiona Ennis has won the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award and was one of the winners of the 2021 Fish Short Story Prize. She was awarded second place in the 2022 LA-based Screencraft Cinematic Short Story Competition. Her work has been highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize. Her fiction has also been shortlisted for other international awards, including the Bristol Short Story Prize, the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and the Aurora Prize for Writing. Her work has been published in anthologies and journals. She is the recipient of an Artlinks Literature Bursary and also an Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council. She holds an MA from National University of Ireland, Galway and a PhD from University College Cork. She lectures in Literature and Philosophy in South East Technological University, Waterford, Ireland. |
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"CLEAVER" by SANDRA DOLORES GÓMEZ AMADOR Winner of the John & Eileen Allman Prize for Poetry Selected by Leila Mottley Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador (she/ella) is a poet, editor, and interpreter-translator born and raised in México. She is an MFA student in Creative Writing and Teaching Associate at The University of Tennessee. Sandra Dolores is the co-founder of the University Network of Women Writers. She is a Tin House, Community of Writers, British Centre for Literary Translation, and Letras Latinas fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Punto de Partida, FlowerSong Press, The McNeese Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is working on her first poetry collection and is the nonfiction editor for Grist Journal. |
WITH READINGS BY OUR HONORABLE MENTION WINNERS:
NONFICTION: “CAGED” BY LIESEL HAMILTON
Liesel Hamilton has published essays in Audubon, Catapult, and The Normal School, and has a book of lyric essays forthcoming from the University of Florida Press. She has an MFA from George Mason University and a PhD from Florida State. She is working on a collection of essays about birds and mental illness.
FICTION: “BUSHMEAT” BY CHINAECHEREM OBOR
Chinaecherem Obor is an Igbo writer from Nigeria. His work appears in Mizna and Prufrock, and is anthologized in Selves: An Afro Anthology of Creative Nonfiction. He has been awarded a Don F. Hendrie prize in fiction by the University of Alabama's Creative Writing program, and was a finalist in the 2024 Bridport Short Story Prize and 2023 Ninth Letter Regeneration Contest. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief at Black Warrior Review.
POETRY: “HARD TO FACE THE DAY” BY CEDRIC RUDOLPH
Cedric Rudolph is a Black, gay writer living in Pittsburgh. He works as a Visiting Lecturer for the University of Pittsburgh. He has also taught for the Institute for Anti-Racist Education and led workshops in Allegheny County Jail. Eavesdrop Magazine recently awarded him third place in their Queer Joy Contest.
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BLR Issue 48, featuring our prizewinners and many more talented writers, is now available! You can order your copy right here when you RSVP, or visit https://blreview.org/store/ to get a copy or become a subscriber. |
