2025 Audrey T. Williams
Legacies Interrupted (coming out in Spring, 2028)
Legacies, Interrupted is part invitation, challenge, myth and prayer. Each of Audrey Williams’ six stories, written in their own genre—from fantasy, surrealism, horror and pure sci-fi—is a beautifully tangled knot of grief, lineage, and time. With sensitivity and skill, Williams pulls at the threads that bind us across generations and weave us into community. Her deep craft evokes both the everyday ordinariness and the terrible beauty of death, asking us who we are because of those who came before us, because of those whose lives have touched our own, because of forces that are beyond our control and yet as intimate as our next breath. Legacies, Interrupted resonates with a clear compelling voice. Wherever Audrey Williams’ talent takes us next, it’s going to be wonderful.
—Arria Deepwater, judge’s citation
Audrey T. Williams has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in Lightspeed Magazine, FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, Space & Time Magazine, Tar Baby Journal, and elsewhere. She was the inaugural Poet Laureate of BayCon (2025) and Co-Chair of the 2026 World Fantasy Convention in Oakland, CA. She holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Audrey has worked as a copywriter in the life sciences industry for 12 years. She lives in the San Francisco East Bay with her mom, husband, and two grumpy chickens.
2022 Arria Deepwater
Descent
Throughout the story, with delicate and precise language and a vivid sense of place, Deepwater explores the mentality of the colonizer, the meaning of wildness, and the perspective of the non-human living beings in our world.
—Michelle Ruiz Keil, judge’s citation
Arria Deepwater is the winner of the 2022 Omnidawn Prize for Fabulist Fiction and the author of Undertow, published in In Between Spaces: An Anthology of Disabled Writers (Stillhouse Press). Arria’s work is informed by the deliciously fractured reality of living in a queer disabled body, often exploring themes of grief, authenticity and the spiritual longing for a healed connection between modern society and the natural world. Arria shares a home with her mother, on a beautiful lake in the unceded Omàmiwinini territory known as eastern, Ontario, Canada.
2021 Marcus Stewart
Shadows and Clouds
In these exquisitely bizarre stories, Marcus Stewart presents a kaleidoscopic vision of what it means to control or to be controlled, showing us how the very forces that appear to help us may threaten to undo everything that we are. These are stories that probe the intersections between domesticity and technology, that pull at the threads of simulation and dream, and that question the very nature of desire in worlds where one’s needs are as impossible to unpuzzle as they are to sate. —Theodora Ziolkowski, Judge’s citation
Marcus Stewart was shortlisted and published by Fabula Press in 2017 and is a former Omnidawn finalist. Over a number of years and in between many different kinds of jobs – some of which have involved writing – Marcus has written sketches and jokes for online and BBC radio comedy and plays for fringe theatre, turning to short story writing more recently. He has lived and worked in many parts of the UK and now lives on the south coast of England with his wife and daughter.
2019 Clyde Derrick
The Ghost Trio
This is an irresistible and original ghost story that moves seamlessly through time and space as it unfolds the history of a brilliant, troubled Czech musician and his lost love. It’s a lyric as intricate and passionate and mournful as Beethoven’s Ghost Trio.
–Molly Gloss, judge’s citation
Clyde Derrick’s first novel The Wash won the Sol Books Fiction Prize for publication, while his experimental story “Each One As She Must” placed third in UCLA’s “Considering Gertrude Stein” competition. His lauded short film Strider’s House has aired on PBS and his plays Angel’s Flight and Teshuvah have been produced on the Los Angeles stage by Write Act Repertory Company. Clyde earned his BA at Pomona College, where he won the Dole King Kinney Prize for writing, and an MFA in Cinema at USC. He lives in Claremont, California. The Ghost Trio is available here.
2019 Kristin Keane
The Luminaries
A story all the more devastating for its moving luminosity, The Luminaries is a darkly tender meditation on the difficulties of being and remaining connected to others, even after death, and the deep ambivalence a person can feel toward their own substance, their own materiality, in a world of loss. Agnes, who works at a camp for grieving children, learns how to tap her own burgeoning emptiness in an effort to connect the substantial with the insubstantial, the grieving with the absent. The story is lovely in its yearning insights, and builds, masterfully, with emotional precision, toward a stunning and resonant conclusion, beautifully evoking the eternal and aching thereness of the no-longer-there. I choose this story because it made me sleepless, as I thought about all the losses that have given my life shape, and the ones yet to come, and the acute sorrows I have never found the language to properly express.
–Kellie Wells, judge’s citation
Kristin Keane’s work has appeared with the New England Review, The Normal School, Electric Literature and elsewhere. She is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University and lives in San Francisco. More of her work can be found at thisisnotreallyhere.space.