Short Story Award Winners – Agency Review
WINNER – “Wind and Embers” by Carol Keeley
In first place, “Wind and Embers,” which is first of all spectacularly authoritative and persuasive in its rendering of the harrowing experience of trying to survive an oncoming wildfire. And it’s equally compelling and moving in its portrait of its protagonist’s psychological position: that mix of pride and shame that has him stubbornly unable to change even as he’s more than emotionally perceptive enough to know just what a mess he’s intermittently made of his life. The story’s masterful as well at evoking the love and compassion that he mostly only communicates through his rituals of both care and what he imagines to be a kind of deference. —Guest Judge Jim Shepard
He tossed things in his truck. Grabbed bungee cords from a plastic mayonnaise jar, strapped down a few boxes, the dog’s bed, her food, his gun case, a jumbled crate of Stacy’s things, one of Eileen’s old paintings, which he found in the cellar and wrapped in a wool blanket. Then he went back through the house one more time, made sure the windows were closed, blinds drawn, gas off, and took pictures in case. He’d heard horror stories about insurance. Stopped to rub the lens with a handkerchief, but it wasn’t the lens. Smoke was spilling into the house. It scraped his lungs, his eyes.
Contact Information: keeleyci@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
This award from The Masters Review is a doubled joy because the story draws on people who deserve honoring: those who fight wildfires and those trying to make the hard journey home from war. It is extracted from a completed novel.
When I moved from Chicago to the mountains in Colorado, I was struck by the idea of volunteer firefighters—neighbors saving one another’s homes, often at the expense of their own—and how such catastrophes imprint differently on each of us. They also reveal our interconnectedness. While interviewing people as research for the novel, I met veterans, who inspired me to offer free writing workshops for vets ever since. They showed me how war and wildfires intersect.
I have several completed manuscripts, including a novel and a memoir-in-essays. Parts of both have won awards. I’d be thrilled if either of these felt worthy of your representation. Both are currently being read by other agents.
SIN EATERS, a 71,000 word novel, is set in an old mountain mining town. A small fire in the foothills is fanned by sudden Chinook winds. Volunteer firefighters are trapped in the box canyon when the fire explodes. In the past, residents would stay to protect their homes.
But this is the first of a new breed of wildfire: unpredictable, fast and deadly.
The novel follows four evacuees, including a burned-out VA counselor who escapes with a wolf-dog and a climate scientist who tries to help manage the increasingly fractious volunteers. The other two are Val Barbeau, from “Wind and Embers,” and a young mother married to a volunteer firefighter. SIN EATERS is based on intensive research, including time at the Fire Academy and embedded with wildland firefighters, as well as my work with combat veterans.
A DELICATE RAGE is a collection of personal essays. It weaves together my messy, magic family of ten; Buddhist psychology; activism; life in the on-fire west; a deadly heart glitch; and stubborn joy. It touches on my Mohawk ancestry.
The title essay was published in Tin House. “Nonjudgment Day,” just won third place in the 2026 Plentitudes Prizes in Nonfiction. “The Dead Whale” won first place in the 2025 Writer’s Digest‘s competition for nonfiction. “Demon Feeding” was selected by Pam Houston for the 2019 Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction. A third essay, “The Gift of Catastrophe,” was a finalist in The Sewanee Review’s 2020 Nonfiction contest, judged by Melissa Febos. “Murmurations” was in Ploughshares, Winter 2024.
I’ve published fiction, poetry and nonfiction. My work has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, New England Review, Arts & Letters, Oxford Poetry, Antioch Review, Chicago Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, The Chicago Tribune, New American Writing, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. I was a finalist for the 2017 Nelson Algren Award and a runner up in Zoetrope’s fiction contest. A short story, “Cremains” was chosen by Elizabeth Strout for Ploughshares. Those two stories are part of a linked collection, which is also completed.
I’d be thrilled to send samples, synopses, or whole manuscripts, if anything here sparks interest. Thank you for your time and interest, and all you do for book lovers.
Personal website: www.carolkeeley.com
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
SECOND PLACE – “When Women Walked on Land” by Emily Mathis
In second place, “When Women Walked on Land,” which partakes of some of Angela Carter’s and Karen Russell’s strains of magical realism. Its originality, though, for me resides in the way it substitutes for the former’s psychoanalytic bent and the latter’s playfulness its twin protagonists’ mordant acceptance of whatever stunning transformations are going to come down the pike. Both protagonists have been through a lot, still have some of their compassion intact, and do what they can to accommodate their fellow beings even as they prepare to accept their isolation. —Guest Judge Jim Shepard
The women on the island hadn’t always turned into alligators. There was a time, before the sand dunes eroded and the lighthouse fell into the ocean, before the cargo ships passed through on the way to Charleston and rerouted the alligator’s nesting, before the bridge connected the island to I-95, before the developers and the golf courses and the Starbucks and the uniform navy blue stucco of all the houses and the carefully planted Palmettos—before all of that, on the island, the women were women, and the alligators were alligators, and there was a clear and distinct separation.
Contact Information: emily@emilymathiswriting.com
Biographical Statement:
I am a writer of fiction and nonfiction living in Brooklyn whose work has recently appeared in, or is forthcoming in, The Masters Review, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. I read for Epiphany, am a member of The Writer’s Studio at The Center for Fiction, and am the former fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. I grew up in the foothills of Appalachia in Western North Carolina, received my undergraduate degree from NYU, two Master’s in Psychology from Columbia University, and am a 2023 graduate of University of North Carolina Greensboro’s MFA program. Prior to moving back to New York in 2025, I spent roughly a decade working as a school psychologist in New Mexico and Hawaii before returning to North Carolina to assist in the caregiving of my stepfather who was diagnosed with an atypical form of Parkinson’s—Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP). During this time, I wrote most of the essays in my complete and available collection, THE WEIGHT OF WATER (approximately 52,000 words), which orients around questions of how to fully inhabit a body, particularly a female body, within a culture constantly dictating what our bodies are for. The collection is unpublished but was a finalist for Iron Horse Literary Review’s First Book Prize (Texas Tech, 2026) and was named a semi-finalist for River Teeth’s Literary Nonfiction Book Prize (2025), the Hudson Prize (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) and the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize (Seneca Review, 2025). The opening essay of this collection, “Men Smoking,” was the 2024 nonfiction winner of Sonora Review’s erotic-themed contest, judged by Margo Steines, who described “Men Smoking” as “a fucking banger…both smart and hot and brings together the felt experience of adolescent sexuality and an adult analysis that is as pressing as it is sage.” Additional essays from the collection have recently appeared in, or are forthcoming in, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Epiphany, Hunger Mountain, and Qu.
In the past year, I have returned to writing fiction, including ten short stories comprising a nearly complete collection, LOVE IN THE TIME OF THE TROLL KING, which, similar to the essays and “When Women Walked on Land” continues to ask questions about the full habitation of bodies and individual desire within a culture of sanitized aesthetic appeal. The collection includes stories about women turning into alligators, a trawler in the North Atlantic struggling with intimacy, a Brooklyn couple navigating the complexities of an age-gap relationship, and a newly married woman trying to figure out sex in a world where the human faces of men have slipped and revealed a troll lurking beneath. Ranging from the surreal to hyper-realistic and often blurring the line between the strangeness of the real and the mundanity of the unreal, stories in the collection explore the ways we find connection to ourselves, and others, in the face of transformation.
I am also working on a novel-length project of “When Women Walked on Land,” in which women from a small island off the coast of South Carolina have turned into alligators for generations, but with the advance of the beauty industry and the transformation of South Carolina’s coast into “master-planned communities,” one woman must decide between living her true nature in the swamps or undergoing a lifetime of invasive cosmetic surgery.
I am happy to share more work from any of these projects for your consideration.
Personal website: emilymathiswriting.com
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
THIRD PLACE – “The Big Reboot” by Michael Hughes Wesner
In third place, “The Big Reboot” by Michael Hughes Wesner, which expertly employs its breezy comic voice to glide the reader past the transparent goofiness of its premise. Its main strength, though, is its narrator’s understated capacity to register—even as he refuses to confront—just how much pain and disconnect lies beneath his relationship to both his family and the world he’s so deftly satirizing, especially when it comes to his wife. I choose to read the ending as only an ersatz happiness—as his having decided to will himself into a state of acceptance that the reader cannot entirely celebrate. —Guest Judge Jim Shepard
The first thing I see through this new head of mine is Jenny’s smiling face, red-nosed and tear-crusted, gazing down at me in the hospital bed. As I blink away the loading screen and stare at her again for the first time, she screams and cries. Bright figures in the back of the room whoop and dance and high-five. My father abandons his cane to hug my little nephew. Nathan, my brother, shoots his fist and howls.
“Come on!” he shouts, careful not to curse in front of his son. “Let’s eff-word go!”
Contact Information: mhwesner@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
I write voice-driven fiction that blends literary realism with slipstream satire. By creating absurd, implausible premises, my writing interrogates themes of tragedy and loss from the angle of farce, following tragicomic characters on the haphazard quest to find meaning in a meaningless world. My stories employ both dark humor and deft sentiment to explore the subjects of medical trauma, mental health crisis, fraught family dynamics, altered identity, and preemptive grieving. I am currently working toward the completion of an upmarket novel and a collection of comedic literary fiction.
My novel, Life Enders, investigates preemptive self-grief and medical trauma through the guise of absurdist tragicomedy. Anthony Gilroy, a recent college graduate and listless PR professional, plummets into quarter-life crisis after his incompetent oncologist loses the results of his life-saving cancer surgery. With the race to save his life slowing to a crawl, Anthony abandons everything, flying from Florida to London to confront his ex-girlfriend in a desperate ploy for answers in the face of his unmoored fate. While his recovery stretches from days to months, Anthony’s search for purpose brings him to bizarre new horizons as he learns to take charge of a life that is quickly ending. For fans of All Fours by Miranda July, Memorial by Bryan Washington, and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or.
The second manuscript, a collection of voice-driven short fiction, merges literary storytelling with fantastical satire in the vein of Marie Helene-Bertino, George Saunders, and Lesley Nneka Arimah. A reality dating show crumbles into crisis after a handsome black hole sweeps the competition. In a bid for heavenly redemption, a foul-mouthed, fumbling angel ushers a human through mourning. An aging automaton designed to counsel middle schoolers seeks therapy after doubting its own purpose. In “The Big Reboot,” which placed third in The Masters Review’s 2026 Short Story Award for New Writers, a decapitated man reconsiders the authenticity of his identity after receiving the world’s first prosthetic head. The stories in this collection reexamine human purpose, grief, power, and desire by way of hyperbolic, heart-wrenching black comedy.
Interview with the author at The Masters Review
HONORABLE MENTION – “The Brothers” by Clare Fielder
It begins with a circle on a page. You set out to realize your vision with an ordered mind and a steady hand. In the center of the circle, you draw the sea creatures, then move out to insects, then the larger land animals. The outer edge of the circle is reserved for the birds. You have a list of all the known animals. The brothers work on it with you, relying not only on your own memories but also the precious books in your modest library. You send brothers to monasteries along the coast, in both directions, where the libraries are better stocked. They return after many months, and add their animals to the list.
Contact Information: clarefielder@hotmail.co.uk
Biographical Statement:
I am a writer and artist, originally from London and now based in Sheffield, UK. I have an undergraduate degree in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University.
Before settling in Sheffield, I spent time living and working in Hanoi, Tokyo, and Barcelona. This distance from home has informed the setting of most of my short stories—a slightly atemporal version of the UK, which is recognizable, but darker and earthier than the world I live in day to day.
Thematically, I explore the intersections of gender, nature, and violence. I am interested in how people are shaped by the landscapes they inhabit, and how nature and violence can impact our relationships to our bodies. My interests span fiction and nonfiction, and I won the 2020 CRAFT Creative Nonfiction prize for an essay about gender identity, writing, and boxing.
In 2023, I completed the Online Drawing Development Year through the Royal Drawing School, which involved drawing intensively from observation, mostly within my own home. This influenced my writing, leading to an interest in moments when characters are forced to confront their perceptions of the world, and to look more closely after discovering things they had misinterpreted.
Alongside writing, I also make graphic narratives, combining words and images, and had my first short comic published in The Rumpus last year.
I have two significant projects underway:
- Not Everything is Magical nor is it a Dream – a novella and short story collection. The title novella (complete) is set in an all-female court in an alternative Arthurian era, and plays with the tropes of chivalric romances to explore queer friendship and longing.
Out of seven complete stories, four are published.
- “The Brothers,” The Masters Review, 2026.
- “Look Around,” Oyster River Pages, 2025. After his glasses are smashed by bullies, a boy believes he sees fairies living in the woods.
- “That More Dear Than Hands Or Tongue,” longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize, 2021/22. A kitchen-maid helps cover up a murder when a party gets out of hand in a remote Scottish house.
- “Melt-water,” Minerva Rising, Issue 12: Fathers, 2016. A girl must deal with the loss of her father and the end of the open range during the Big Die-Up of 1886.
The collection will appeal to readers of Carys Davies’s The Redemption of Galen Pike, Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman, and Daniel Mason’s A Registry of My Passage Upon The Earth.
- The Faithless – a literary novel about queer pirates. The Golden Age of piracy is coming to an end, and the all-female crew of The Faithless are keen to write themselves into the historical record. Told episodically, and interwoven with fabricated archival elements, the book queers the traditional pirate story.
HONORABLE MENTION – “Hulijing” by Stephanie Isan
And my mother’s eyes blacken. She shoves aside the hand and performs the fouettés again and again and again. And again. Until the vamp of her one pointe shoes begins to spot with blood and her camisole is drenched in sweat. And in the Capitol Hill studio office, where my adult mother once sat nightly, wearing the faux leather seat of her chair thin, watching this same clip of herself as a teenager being screamed at by her own mother, I also rewound the tape again. And again and again and again.
Contact Information: is.stephanieisan@gmail.com
Biographical Statement:
I am a software engineer and a third-year MFA student in prose at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Stephanie Isan is my pen name and my short stories and poems are published and/or forthcoming in Joyland Mag, AGNI, Five Points, Split Lip, The Bellevue Literary Review, and others. I am a Kundiman fellow, a Juniper Institute Fellow, and my writing has been generously supported by the McCormack Writing Center and the Kenyon Writers Workshop. I write voice-driven literary fiction with upmarket appeal, exploring themes of feminine and familial performance, rituals of love and loss, racial melancholia and dissociation, and queer forms of identity, intimacy, and kinship.
I’m currently finishing and revising an 85,000-word novel tentatively titled BARN BURNING, which will resonate to readers of White Ivy by Susie Yang, The Coin by Yasmin Zaher, All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky, and Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch. Set amid the stratified suburbs of Silicon Valley and Taiwan where wealth and precarity exist side by side, BARN BURNING opens in the sharp, sardonic voice of Evie, a Chinese adoptee and wedding photographer, who spots Ada at a funeral. When Ada buys Evie’s childhood Barbie Dreamhouse off Craigslist, the apathetic and sheltered Evie finds herself attracted to this charming yet odd woman who collects and restores dollhouses for reasons she can’t explain. As Evie is drawn further into Ada’s orbit, we learn more about her past: Ada compulsively fixes up dollhouses only to burn them, once worked as a paid Taiwanese funeral mourner, and is looking to both atone for her past and leave it firmly behind.
An excerpt of BARN BURNING won the 2026 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction and was the runner-up for the 2026 Harvey Swados Prize. Juan Martinez lauded the novel’s “compassionate, Chekhovian eye,” and Kristen Arnett praised Evie’s “camera-lens attitude” toward encountering the world, calling the excerpt “funny, sad, joyful, and full of bravado.” At its core, BARN BURNING asks what it means to belong to a family and what weddings and funerals reveal about love, kinship, and assimilation. I’m interested in the rituals through which we perform for family and belonging and the ways those rituals can both bind us to one another and expose the distances between us.
Beyond BARN BURNING, I’m developing a short story collection and a second novel with a poetry chapbook in progress.
Selected Published Stories:
– Hey, Cam Club (Joyland Mag)
– Chinese Mermaids (jmww)
– How to Make Non-Korean Kimchi (Split Lip)
– The Real Chupa Chup (Five Points)
Personal website: stephanieisan.com