We are thrilled to announce the winners and finalists of the 2026 Adroit Journal Editor’s Prizes in Poetry & Fiction!
Through this 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 in its second year, the Adroit Editor’s Prizes invite established writers to join our pages through a prize dedicated to excellence in craft and daring in vision.
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The recipient of the 2026 Adroit Journal Editor’s Prize in Poetry is Sara Hovda of Riverside, California, for her poem “Men and Starlings and Women.”
Sara Hovda is a transgender woman from rural Minnesota. She currently attends the MFA program at UC-Riverside while also working as a streamer on Twitch. Her first book, Night’s Grammar, won the Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July of 2027. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as North American Review, South Dakota Review, Permafrost, and Shō Poetry Journal, among others. She can be found online at sarahovda.com.
Editor’s Statement:
“Powered by an affecting economy of emotion plus control over its ever-alchemizing form, Sara Hovda’s “Men and Starlings and Women” knits together lyric and narrative to create an elegant interplay of tenderness and violence. “I’ve never heard a song from the papery branches and thought to snap the plump clarinet’s neck. But I’ve heard such a sound and thought, what if I could make one tone even half as beautiful,” Hovda writes in her exquisite poem, a transcendent self-mythology that unfolds in movements, shimmering with both grief and starlings.” — Eugenia Leigh, Senior Poetry Editor.
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The recipient of the 2026 Adroit Journal Editor’s Prize in Fiction is Leslie Pietrzyk of Winston Salem, North Carolina, for her story “Hyenas.”
Leslie Pietrzyk has published three novels and two collections of short stories, most recently, Admit This to No One (Unnamed Press, 2021). Her first collection of stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Short fiction and essays have appeared in, among others, Ploughshares, Story, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Okay Donkey, Cincinnati Review, The Forge, Pithead Chapel, and Split Lip Magazine. Awards include a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She’s @lesliepwriter on social media and Substack.
Editor’s Statement:
“Everyone grieves differently, sure. Three teen-aged brothers terrorize a worker in a Dairy Queen in a show of complex grief in Leslie Pietrzyk’s “Hyenas”. They see themselves as “shit brothers.” As one of them says, “You only get attention around here when you’re dead.” Pietzyk’s prose not just evokes the tumult and guilt of a family through these boys in the 1970s, before #metoo, it also compels the reader to ask what could have been done differently?” – Cherry Lou Sy, Senior Prose Editor.
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2026 Editor’s Prize Finalists:
Beth Levine (Fiction)
Chelsea Peters (Fiction)
Anna V. Q. Ross (Poetry)
William Pei Shih (Fiction)
Constant Laval Williams (Poetry)
Amy Woolard (Poetry)
Beth Levine (Fiction)’s writing has appeared in The Bloomin’ Onion and Wanderlust Journal. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids and two cats, and is at work on her first novel.
Chelsea Peters Parkinson (Fiction) is a writer and editor from Treaty 1 territory, currently living in Los Angeles. Her short fiction and poetry have recently appeared, or are forthcoming in, The Adroit Journal, The Fiddlehead, This Magazine, PRISM international, The Dalhousie Review, and CV2. Her short story, “Mudlark,” a National Magazine Award finalist for fiction, recently appeared in Biblioasis‘ Best Canadian Fiction 2025.
Anna V. Q. Ross (Poetry) is the author of Flutter, Kick (Red Hen Press), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award and named a “Best New Poetry Book” by the New York Public Library. Her previous books include Figuring (Bull City Press) and If a Storm (Anhinga Press). Her work has recently been supported by fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and appears in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Plume, and on The Slowdown.
William Pei Shih (Fiction)’s stories have been featured in The Best Short Stories 2026: The O. Henry Prize Winners, The Best American Short Stories 2025, The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Georgia Review, The Boston Review, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Joyland Magazine, Guernica Magazine, The Southern Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is the fiction editor at Guernica Magazine and teaches at New York University. For more information, visit williampeishih.com.
Constant Laval Williams (Poetry) is the author of Elegy with Beautiful Child (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions), which was chosen as the winner of Copper Nickel‘s 2025-2026 Jake Adam York Prize, judged by Patricia Smith. He earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, where he received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Lana Turner, and Blackbird, among others. Though he is first and foremost a poet, he is also a polymathic creative, releasing and performing darkwave music under the name Casket Cassette, and documenting subculture and visual melancholy through analog photography. He is from Los Angeles.
Amy Woolard (Poetry) is a civil rights attorney for the ACLU of Virginia and teaches courses at the intersection of art, writing & justice at UVA School of Law. Her debut poetry collection, Neck of the Woods, received the Alice James Award & was published in April 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, & Ploughshares, among others, while her essays and reporting have been featured in Slate, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and the Cork International Poetry Festival. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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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!