Winners of The 2025 Orison Prizes in Poetry & Fiction

Orison Books is pleased to announce the results of The 2025 Orison Prizes in Poetry & Fiction.

POETRY RESULTS

Phillip B. Williams has selected "Request to the God Trinket" by Craig Beaven as the poetry winner from a pool of anonymous finalist manuscripts. Beaven will receive $1,500 and publication by Orison Books.

We'd like to recognize the following finalists and semi-finalists.

POETRY FINALISTS

Aditi Bhattacharjee, "Daughterling"

Daniel Biegelson, "(p)raise"

Sati Mookherjee, "Ars Dialectica"

Christine Robbins, "Hysteria"

Anne Yarbrough, "Scrap, Feather, Bone"

POETRY SEMI-FINALISTS

Gauri Awasthi, "The Mother Wound"

Mike Bove, "Stone Math"

Nishi Chalwa, "Indiginized...Tribalized"

Jennifer Davis Michael, "Bodies at Rest"

Jessica Dubey, "Every Door's an Invitation and an Exile"

Zainab Hashmi, "a sequence of missteps led me [ ]"

Paul Martin, "The Bright Cockatiel"

Clif Mason, "Spellbound"

Steve McDonald, "Not Eden"

Daniel Murphy, "Love's Mythology"

Jae Newman, "Fishbones"

Susan O'Dell Underwood, "Tempest Kin"

Luke Patterson, "Medic"

Lisa Rosinsky, "No Known Provenance"

Lailah Shima, "Bright Ache of Seeing"

Tony Koji Wallin-Sato, "After Death Haikus: Jisatsu 自殺"

ABOUT "REQUEST TO THE GOD TRINKET"

About the winning manuscript, Phillip B. Williams, author of Mutiny, writes: "Science and religion tangle in this elegant and lyrical collection to create new myths, new ways to understand. The weather itself morphs into glass beads and in turn morphs the world beneath it. The Ascension of Christ becomes a moment to ponder the mundane miracles of both a wound and a scorpion's sting. Craig Beaven finds in short, surprising lines a unified fabric of fragments where every world contains and is contained by its materials: 'When you open the stone / it’s blood red inside. / When you open the lake / it’s blood stone[.]' These pristine poems open us to the blood of our own divine hearts."

ABOUT THE WINNER

Craig Beaven is the author of four previous poetry collections and chapbooks, most recently In Arcadia (Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series/Seven Kitchens Press) and Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You (Anhinga Press Poetry Prize). His work has appeared in Bennington Review, The Hollins Critic, Western Humanities Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Beaven is the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from The Sewanee Writers Conference, The Vermont Studio Center, The Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing, and others.

FICTION RESULTS

Tessa Fontaine has selected "In the Dark All Cats Are Gray: A Novel" by Lance Tukell as the fiction winner from a pool of anonymous finalist manuscripts. Tukell will receive $1,500 and publication by Orison Books.

We'd like to recognize the following finalists and semi-finalists.

FICTION FINALISTS

Fergus Mackenzie, “Pray for Us”

Mark A. Thompson, “Dragon on a Leash”

Jill Widner, “When Stars Fell Like Salt”

FICTION SEMI-FINALISTS

Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal, “Soft Goodbyes Through Broken Veils”

Jeff Dingler, “Mother of Exiles”

Seunghyun Kim, “All That Bears Fruit Unseen”

R.D. Saporita, “Vidik the Tailor”

Faith Shearin, “A Bed Filled With Birds”

Joe Taylor, “Dappled Things”

Gemini Wahhaj, “Rags to Riches”

ABOUT "IN THE DARK ALL CATS ARE GRAY"

About the winning manuscript, Tessa Fontaine, author of The Red Grove, writes: "In the Dark All Cats Are Gray is a deeply-feeling novel about the ways we come to accept who we are. The novel follows a young man who, feeling unmoored and afraid of his sexuality as a teenager, finds a place of devotion and belonging in the Jewish Orthodox community. But being an outsider—and being afraid to accept his own queer sexuality—throws Herschel into a difficult world of navigating who he is, and who he wants to be. This is a beautiful novel about faith and belonging, and the winding road we all must traverse to make sense of the multi-faceted components of our identity. I admire this writer's willingness to look at hard questions without providing simple answers, and to construct such a propulsive coming-of-age story that asks this important question: who do we get to become, if the pieces of who we are don't align in the world we want to live inside? How do we then live with all our truths?"

ABOUT THE WINNER

Lance Tukell is a writer and memoirist in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Tablet Magazine and he was a finalist in the 2024 Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Tukell is the creator of The Clever Corporate Navigator™, an online resource offering ways to thrive in challenging workplace environments. He received his M.Ed. from Capella University and a coaching certification from iCoachNY at the Zicklin School of Business (CUNY).

THE 2026 ORISON PRIZES

The 2026 Orison Prizes in Fiction & Poetry will be open for submissions from December 1, 2025 – April 1, 2026. The poetry judge will be Leila Chatti, author of Wildness Before Something Sublime and Deluge. Fiction judge TBA.