We are pleased to announce the winners, finalists, and semifinalists of the Terrain.org 16th Annual Contests in Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction.

Each winner is awarded a $1,000 prize, finalists awarded $200, and semifinalists are awarded $100. Winners, finalists, and semifinalists will be published beginning in February in Terrain.org, and the winners will participate in the March 2024 Terrain.org online reading.

Poetry

**“because the world didn’t end,” “Affidavit for the Floodplain,” and “Where the Reservoir Gave Us Its Last Three Coins” by Hayden Park **Hayden Park is a writer and musician from Southern California. She is the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2025 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a YoungArts Winner with Distinction in Fiction and Winner in Nonfiction, and a Scholastic National Medalist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Zone 3, The Shore Poetry, Moon City Review, and elsewhere.

Judge Blas Falconer says**: **Reading through the remarkable finalist poems, I kept returning to the winning group (“because the world didn’t end,” “Affidavit for the Floodplain,” and “Where the Reservoir Gave Us Its Last Three Coins”), which signals its ambition from the titles alone. Structurally, sonically, and imaginatively, the work pushes against its own boundaries, reaching toward larger ecological and communal concerns while remaining grounded in precise, intimate details. Consider “the texture of a peach,” “the fuzz against the teeth.” Or this: “[The] neighbor’s mare, a ghost of a thing tangled in the low branches of an oak./ Her eye a black pearl, an unblinking verdict.” Or even this:

The water pulled back and offered up its dead: a doll’s head, porcelain-crazed and eyeless, a clutch of soda bottles thick with green algae, a single patent leather shoe breathing mud.

Together, the poems consider individual loss alongside broader environmental grief, allowing personal histories and shared futures to coexist in a single, steady vision.

The finalists in poetry are “Poplar,” “Gift,” and “Black Widow by the Door” by Amy Miller; “Grounded,” “Mud Sparrows,” and “On the old turnpike, thinking about what we make in this world” by Laura Long; and “Last Dream of Earth” and “Self-Repair” by Mistee St. Clair.

Nonfiction

**“Entanglement” by Kelly R. McGuire **Kelly R. McGuire is a founder and past president of Far Western Anthropological Research Group. His scholarly work has appeared in books and journals, including *American Antiquity, American Museum of Natural History Anthropological Series, Quaternary International, University Utah Press, Left Coast Press, and Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology. His previous creative nonfiction has appeared in Terrain.org and Catarmaran *and, along with “Entanglement,” reflects his career-long passion in bringing both the science and experience of archaeology to a broader audience. He splits his time between Davis, California, and Gold Hill, Nevada.

Judge Doug Carlson says: Ostensibly an essay about the relationships among archeological artifacts and humans, “Entanglements” emerges as an expansive meditation on one such excavated object: a humble button with military aspirations. The author follows the button’s reach as it “swirls in a multi-verse of time, symbols, histories, and possibilities until it is revealed⎯-captured in some sense”—only to begin a new set of entanglements, never to decay. Artfully braided into the essay’s rich flow of information is the brutal narrative of colonialism and the annihilation of indigenous cultures. The result is engaging and intelligent, at once well conceived and made.

The finalists in nonfiction are “Sleep or Something Like It” by** Mary Herrington-Perry** and “(Un)usual Mortality Event” by Meghan Keaney Anderson.

Fiction

**“Sumbisori” by Jay McKenzie**** Jay McKenzie reads, writes, and procrastinates in the Northern Rivers, Australia. This year, she’s won the Fish, Midway Journal, Write by the Sea and Danahy Prizes, and her work appears in Fractured Lit, Fictive Dream, Maudlin House, and others. How to Lose the Lottery will be published by Harper Fiction in March 2026.

Judge Samantha Dunn says: “Sumbisori” captivated me from its lush first line and never let me go. Told from the point of view of a young Haenyeo, the famed female divers of South Korea, the story masterfully drifts and tightens like a tide, pulling the reader into a singular world where ambition and contemporary culture crash up against ancestral calling. The narrative explores female friendships in all of their beauty, complication, and ultimate healing power. Folklore and ocean ecology run like currents through the prose. Each sentence resonated, startlingly alive and original. By the time I arrived at the story’s satisfying end, I realized I was actually holding my breath.

The **finalists **in fiction are “Cowboys” by Harrison Dietzman and “Into the A Horizona” by Ana C. H. Silva.

The semifinalist in fiction is “A Piece of Work” by Alan Sincic.

Next Contest

We will begin accepting submissions for the 17th Annual Contests in Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction on May 1, 2026. The submission deadline is September 7, 2026 (Labor Day in the U.S.). Judges will be announced in April.

For additional information, view the contest guidelines or contact us.

Header photo by Mauro Segura, courtesy Pixabay.