New Letters is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 New Letters Literary Awards. Winners
received a cash prize of $2,500 and will be published in the winter/spring 2026 issue of New Letters.
First Runner-Up: Auden Eagerton, “I Will Always Tell You My Childhood Home is Made of Cedar& Other Poems”
Jo Blair Cipriano
Jo Blair Cipriano is a writer, artist, and sexual assault survivor who unequivocally supports LANDBACK and the liberation of all oppressed peoples. A former college dropout, they are the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and two University of Arizona MFA Creative Writing Awards, and have received support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Brooklyn Poets. Jo was a 2024 Writer-In-Residence at the Hemingway House and holds an MFA in fiction and poetry from the University of Arizona.
Simone Muench is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and the author of seven full-length books, including Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande; winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize), Wolf Centos (Sarabande), and The Under Hum (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), cowritten with Jackie K. White. Poems are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.
Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator who has had a Notable Essay in the 2023 Best American Essays series. His short stories, essays, and works of translation have appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, and Massachusetts Review, among other journals. He is the winner of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. You can find him at www.siavashsaadlou.com.
Jesse Lee Kercehval
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a writer, translator, and graphic artist. Her recent books include the poetry collection America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Press, 2019), winner of the Dorset Prize, and the short story collection Underground Women (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Her graphic narratives and illustrated essays have appeared in Waxwing, Sweet Lit, The Quarantine Public Library, On the Seawall, and New England Review.
Ian Becker’s fiction won the Bat City Review Editors’ Prize for Fiction in 2021 and was a finalist for American Short Fiction’s Short(er) Fiction Prize in 2022. He lives in Chicago, where he works as an urban planner focused on urban climate change adaptation and plays drums in the band Krill. He is currently at work on a book of short stories.
Phong Nguyen is the author of three novels, The Bronze Drum (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), Roundabout: An Improvisational Fiction (Moon City Press, 2020) and The Adventures of Joe Harper (Outpost19, 2016), winner of the Prairie Heritage Book Award; and two story collections: Pages from the Textbook of Alternate History (C&R Press, 2019) and Memory Sickness and Other Stories (Elixir Press, 2011), winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. He is co-editor, with Dan Chaon and Norah Lind, of the book Nancy Hale: On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master (Pleiades Press/LSU Press, 2012), part of the Unsung Masters Series. He is series editor for the Best Peace Fiction anthology (University of New Mexico Press). His own stories have appeared in more than 50 national literary journals and anthologies, including Agni, Boulevard, Chattahoochee Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, PANK, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, and Texas Review.
Sarah Burke, Jo Blair Cipriano, Auden Eagerton, Jonathan Greenhause, Mikey Jones, Leigh Lucas, Kelan Nee, Weijia Pan,
Lucas Daniel Peters, Amanda Rabaduex, Maya Salameh, Junxin Tang, Tanya Young
Kelsey Ferrell, Matt Hollrah, Alexandra Lang, Kerstin Lieff, Elissa E. Minor, Keya Mitra, Siavash Saadlou,
Katie Schmid, Faith Shearin, Holly Starley
Emerson Archer, Victor Barall, Isabelle Barany, Ian Becker, Gretchen Beyer, Stewart Engesser, Corinne Harrison, Holtz,
Maurice Labi, Maia Morgan, Kasey Peters, John Ulmer