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)
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GENRES & ELIGIBILITY
- Poetry: Submit 1–3 poems in a single document.
- Fiction: Submit 1 short story (max 6,000 words recommended).
- All entries must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, provided you disclose your submission as such. Note: If your work is accepted elsewhere, just let us know right away—use the MESSAGES tab in Submittable, not the Notes tab (which we do not receive).
- Writers may enter both the Poetry and Fiction categories.
- We are encouraging submissions from writers with at least one published book.
- We welcome submissions from writers of all backgrounds and nationalities.
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UPCOMING DATES & DEADLINES
- Submissions Open: July 1, 2027.
- Submission Deadline: July 31, 2027, or once submission caps have been reached.
- Result Announcement: Fall 2027.
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SUBMISSION PORTAL
All entries must be submitted via our Submittable portal.
Please note: We do not accept submissions via post or email, except in the case of accessibility accommodations. Writers with disabilities that do not allow for Submittable entry may email us at editors[at]theadroitjournal[dot]org.
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IMPORTANT: SUBMISSION CAP!
We will only consider the first 500 POETRY submissions and the first 300 FICTION submissions. Once these submission caps are achieved, the submission category will automatically close. We encourage you to submit early—once our submission quotas are met, we will be unable to accept additional entries.
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ENTRY FEE
- The Editor’s Prize submission fee is $15/submission.
- All proceeds will support The Adroit Journal‘s editorial operations, including our ongoing commitment to offering contributor stipends to each issue contributor, as well as awarding the prizes.
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JUDGING
All entries will be read and evaluated by members of The Adroit Journal‘s editorial staff. To learn more about our staff, please click here.
Please note that you may submit revisions of work previously submitted to the journal’s general submissions windows, as well as to previous cycles of the Adroit Prizes and Djanikian & Veasna So Scholars.
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Previous Winners
Jenny Molberg, “Exstasis” (Poetry)
Rebecca Bernard, “In Plato’s Cave No. 1” (Fiction)
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.”
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.”
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)
