We are thrilled to announce the winners and finalists of the 2025 Adroit Journal Editor’s Prizes in Poetry & Fiction!
Through this inaugural pair of prizes, the editors recognize outstanding work in poetry and short fiction by any writer, regardless of age or stage. The recipient of the Editor’s Prize in Poetry and the recipient of the Editor’s Prize in Fiction will each receive $1,000 and publication in an upcoming issue.
For over a decade, The Adroit Journal has championed emerging voices through our globally recognized Mentorship Program, Adroit Prizes for Poetry & Prose, and scholarship opportunities honoring Gregory Djanikian and Anthony Veasna So. Now, for the first time, we invite established writers to join our pages through a prize dedicated to excellence in craft and daring in vision.
The recipient of the 2025 Adroit Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry is Jenny Molberg of Somerville, Massachusetts, for her poem “Ekstasis.”
Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. She is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.
Editor’s Statement:
“Present, future, past selves, and their interlocutors associatively click together in this revelatory poem. Molberg writes toward the process of discovery and remembrance, emblematic of the work’s movement: ‘Healing is not linear so it swirls at the drain. // Every line knows.’ We are moved by the earnestness, the violence, the humor, the ekphrastic collisions—how it uncovers a new boundary.”
The recipient of the 2025 Adroit Journal Editor’s Prize in Fiction is Rebecca Bernard of Greenville, North Carolina, for her story “In Plato’s Cave No. 1.”
Rebecca Bernard’s work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Indiana Review, and The Cincinnati Review, among other places. She is the author of the story collection Our Sister Who Will Not Die (Mad Creek Books, 2022), winner of the 2021 Non/Fiction Prize held by The Journal. She is an Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University and serves as a Fiction Editor for The Boiler.
Editor’s Statement:
“Told in a voice that’s both tender and powerful, this story is a meditation on what it means to inhabit a body, and even transcend it. It’s about the fragility of love, things that test it and the extraordinary moments in which it mends itself.”
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2025 Editor’s Prize Finalists:
Elizabeth Graver (Fiction)
Chloe Honum (Poetry)
Weijia Pan (Poetry)
A.J. Rodriguez (Fiction)
Corey Van Landingham (Poetry)
Patrick J. Zhou (Fiction)
Elizabeth Graver (Fiction)’s fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother Rebecca, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and New York. Kantika was awarded the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, the Julia Ward Howe Award, the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, and a National Jewish Book Award. It was named a Best Historical Fiction Book of 2023 and Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Lilith and Libby, and translated into German and Turkish. Elizabeth’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College.
Chloe Honum (Poetry) is the author of two poetry collections, The Tulip-Flame and The Lantern Room, and a chapbook, Then Winter. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Sargeson Fellowship for New Zealand Writers, and a Texas Institute of Letters Award. Her poems have appeared in journals including The Yale Review, Poetry Magazine, and The Paris Review. She was raised in Auckland, New Zealand, and currently lives in Texas.
Weijia Pan (Poetry) is the author of Motherlands (Milkweed Editions, 2024), selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and winner of the 2025 Levis Reading Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
A.J. Rodriguez (Fiction) is a Chicano writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of Cornell University and the University of Oregon’s MFA program. His work has been awarded the Granum Foundation Prize and received support from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Kerouac Project, the Hawthornden Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades. His fiction also appears in New England Review, Passages North, The Common, and elsewhere.
Corey Van Landingham (Poetry) is the author of Antidote and Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens, and Reader, I. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.
Patrick J. Zhou (Fiction) lives in Washington, D.C. with his family. His stories have been published in the Cincinnati Review, South Carolina Review, Quarterly West and hex literary among others and he has been honored with the 2023 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the Cincinnati Review’s 2024 Schiff Award for Fiction, and a 2025 Wigleaf Top 50. He also adds story notes and cat pictures at his website, patrickjzhou.com.
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Stay tuned for next year’s Editor’s Prizes, which will open in summer 2026 to submissions from emerging and established writers alike! Click here to learn more and sign up for updates!