Announcing: Winners of the 2025 Online Contest.
"Royal Typewritter" by pasa47 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the Columbia Journal’s 2025 Online contest:
Fiction
Winner: Dana Wall with her story “Dissolution Studies”
Runner-up: Rebekah Sanderlin with her story “Jump to Recipie”
What the Judge, Mike Harvkey said:
I chose "Dissolution Studies" for its wonderful and rare combination of traits: a unique, imaginative, very specific storytelling vision that perfectly balances intelligence and emotion. The obsession at its core is nicely muted, normalized, by elegant, measured prose and a slightly detached first-person perspective, so that even a shrieking collapse into grief arrives on the page as if underwater. I love to encounter a story that truly could only have been written by this writer. I fully expect to see the writer's work showing up in more journals, and my advice is simple: you've already got a unique, specific vision. Embrace it, sink into it; try not to allow external pressures or suggestions derail or distract you from doing what you're already doing so well. This may include voices from the publishing industry, "market" voices. We all want to publish stories, to sell books, and it's necessary to listen to the pros when they have our best creative interests at heart. But it's not always the case that they do. Some of them sometimes get it wrong. So I encourage you to resist anyone asking you to set aside your specific uniqueness or pushing you in a direction that doesn't feel right to you. Feed and protect your vision.
Poetry
Winner: Bettina de Leonbarrera with her poem, “The East Valley Mermaid in Manzanita, Oregon
Runner-up: Ellie Laabs with the poem, “Venus Takes the Night Shift."
What the judge, Rick Barot said:
The voice in “The East Valley Mermaid in Manzanita, Oregon” has what my students call rizz. It’s charismatic, expansive, full of bravado. But it’s also intimate, tender, nostalgic. Informed by the energies of what’s close (“break-up songs”) and what’s cosmic (“half time moons”), the poem is a rough, beautiful
Translation
Winner: Sara Elkamel translating “Two Poems” by Dalia Taha
Runner-up: Sian Valvis translating “Ballad” by Dimosthenis Papamarkos
What the judge, Stine An said:
Sara Elkamel’s crisp, alchemical translations of Dalia Taha’s spare yet viscerally unsparing poems remind us that translation demands radical attention and intention. Elkamel meticulously attends to Taha’s self-described “attempts to copy, on paper, the poems before me: the inhabitants of my city.” In these translations, each vowel lives on the page—breathing, watching, sensing. Each “o” becomes an olive, a poem, an observer—the unflinching eye of a camera lens that documents atrocity and looks back at the reader. The translator and poet write and witness side by side, attempting “[o]nly for love” to copy what can never be copied—the “[t]hirteen million love stories stretched across the hills.”
We want to congratulate all the winner and runner-ups, alongside everyone else who participated this year!
Non Fiction
TBC
