2025 Contest Winners Interviews

From Monic Ductan, 2025 Poetry Winner

1. What inspired you to write your piece?
I wrote “Mama Took Grandma to Vote for Kennedy” after a conversation I had with my mother. She told me that grandma was despondent after Kennedy was killed. I tried to reconcile that with what I know about American history and what I know about my own family history. My grandma was born in 1913, and her family were poor farmers. A couple of generations before that, they were enslaved. I wish I’d asked my grandma to tell me more stories from when she was young. She passed away when I was about fourteen. Like a lot of impoverished people who lived through the Great Depression, she hated to waste resources. She reused empty peanut butter jars by repurposing them as drinking glasses. She didn’t like to turn on the lights during the day, so she’d just open the curtains and use natural light. Though I only had her with me for a little while, I still think about her, and I can vividly remember certain things–how her kitchen smelled like Palmolive dish soap, how she made fried bologna sandwiches, and that she rarely called me by my name. I’m in the process of writing my first poetry collection, Man Sold Separately, and she and Granddaddy are in several of the poems.

2. What were some of the factors that influenced you to submit to our Festival?
I saw the ad for the contest in Poets & Writers. I’d been writing a few poems at the time, and I finished this Kennedy poem right before the deadline. I like how you promote writers by publishing their bios and photos on the contest website, and the $1,000 prize is sweet, too.

3. How did it feel to find out you were the winner?
I was ecstatic when I got the notification on my phone. I texted an old friend of mine from graduate school. Later, I posted about it on social media. I’m proud to have this award, which is named after Tennessee Williams, one of my favorite writers.

4. What are you working on now?
I’m working on several projects that I’d like to see published during the next few years. I’m writing a poetry book called Man Sold Separately. It’s about a woman estranged from the men in her life–her father, brothers, and lovers. I’m in the process of deciding which poems to include, and I may need to draft about 5-10 more. I also have an in-progress personal essay collection about my family. I’m making some progress on my novel about a small town 9-1-1 operator whose police officer boyfriend is involved in a fatal shooting. It’s tentatively called Send 12, and it’s not quite finished yet.

5. Do you have any new publication news you’d like to share?
I have a short story called “Dollhouses” that will be reprinted in Rural Writers of Color, which is the third installment of that anthology. It’s edited by Deesha Philyaw and set to be released in November 2025 from Cutleaf Press. I also have a story called “Another Sunshine Day” forthcoming in an anthology called Tipping Point: Ecofiction for Tomorrow’s World, which is edited by Max Dosser, a writer and lecturer at Vanderbilt University. I have another story, “Leaving Gillespie’s Pointe” forthcoming in an anthology called Black Butterfly: Voices of the African Diaspora, which is being published by Kinsman Avenue Publishing this year.

 

From Nicolette Visciano, 2025 One-Act Winner

1. What inspired you to write your piece?

Spit is my fictional one-act play, meant to serve as a tribute to one of my personal heroes—Roxanne Shante—who paved the way for women in hip-hop. Set in Queensbridge, New York in 1984, a seventeen-year-old girl steps up to the battle rap stage to challenge the current king of the game—Kid Krush. Not only does the main protagonist fight to prove her skills and worth in a space dominated by men, but she also fights for justice through releasing her truth as a survivor of sexual assault by her opponent. With a balance of wit, strife, and courage, these verses are meant to shed light on the subtext and silence that has been denied the spotlight. I was originally inspired to develop this idea when challenged with a writing prompt that explored status through dialogue. At first struggling to pin down a specific social situation I wanted to explore, I suddenly realized: what is a fight for status more than a battle rap? Upon seeing the visceral reactions of my workshop peers from my first scene, I continued to expand this seed of a story. For context, my first piece of writing was a song at four years old; at fifteen, I began writing rap verses. At the end of Spit, the battle-rap dialogue transitions into a spoken-word poem, reflecting the poetry at my core. Music and poeticism have always been the foundational elements of everything I write, so writing a poetically-intentional battle rap felt like home to me. These voices poured out of me as if they were real, which made seeing my words performed at the staged reading feel like I was meeting my characters as I always imagined them.

2. What were some of the factors that influenced you to submit to our Festival?

The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival has been long revered, and a goal I wanted to reach for when I felt ready to. As many writers do, I have my own special relationship with the creative works of Tennessee Williams. Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire has haunted me in the best of ways. “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” just as she does, and the way I search for magic is through words. My love for Tennessee Williams and Blanche DuBois goes so deep that this character of his served as a main pillar in which I built my research for my undergraduate thesis at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where I graduated with my BA in creative writing in 2023. To have a creation of my own find a home at this Festival that celebrates one of my favorite authors who birthed a literary character that changed my life and my relationship with writing is more than I could ever put into words.

3. How did it feel to find out you were the winner?

I received the news while in the office of Northern Michigan University’s English Department, where I am currently pursuing my MFA in creative writing and teaching English Composition. As utterly dramatic as it sounds, I must admit that I dropped to my knees in front of the printer and started crying. The first person I called was my mom—who has been the main supporter of my dreams. This first-place award felt like a win for the both of us, and I am even more blessed that she would attend the Festival with me to celebrate this moment together. After ending that phone call, I immediately knocked on the door of NMU’s Head of the English Department—Dr. David Wood—who was one of the first mentors to welcome me into the MFA program and truly support my creative endeavors. Not only am I grateful for the honor of this award, but I feel blessed at having invaluable support from those closest to me and NMU’s creative writing program that I am currently calling home.

4. What were some of your favorite things about attending the Festival?

My favorite part of the Festival was having the opportunity to meet those who made my attendance and the magic of my one-act play staged reading possible. My words and I being welcomed at the Festival by Judge Justin Maxwell, Coordinator David Hoover, and the UNO alumni performers was an extraordinary experience. I was in awe of the staged reading, as I could not have asked for a more talented cast of performers or a more precise performance in alignment with my script’s vision, under the direction of Richon May. Furthermore, I enjoyed meeting all of the talented minds that attended the Festival, and listening to their words and learning from their expertise. Here Come the Girls: What Crime Fiction Tells Us About the Lives of Girls and Women was my mom and I’s favorite panel (although we may be a little biased, considering that Gillian Flynn is one of our favorite authors); we were so enraptured by the conversations at play between four brilliant women and left this discussion feeling immensely inspired.

5. What are you working on now?

Presently, I am working on my thesis for my MFA degree, which is a magical memoir. As a writer, I am greatly inspired by magical realism and am working to apply magic to reality through the vessel of metaphor. Moreover, having graduated with a minor in children studies, I am striving to reimagine and redefine memories from my childhood in order to reach a deeper form of the truth and create an empowering ripple-effect that will extend toward adolescents. I aim for my words to grant a magical impulse to the mundane and carve a pathway for positive progression—particularly within educational systems. My main argument is the correlation between magic and childhood innocence, and why upholding such magic is critical for adult survival. With this shift, I hope for change in readers’ perspectives and institutions that uphold boxes placed around possibilities at the expense of imaginative freedom and creative empowerment of growing children.

6. Do you have any new publication news you’d like to share?

I am currently an Associate Editor and Poetry Team Lead for Passages North and am ecstatic to be part of this innovative literary force, and to work alongside such inspiring writers that share the same values as I do when it comes to the humanity found within creativity. The opportunity to care for the submissions of fellow writers the way I hope my own words are cared for is one I am grateful for and hold very close to my heart. Issue 46 of Passages North was recently released, with exhilarating poetry that I’m proud has found a home with us.

 

Katie Henken Robinson, 2025 Fiction Winner

1. What inspired you to write your piece?

The story behind the story is that I happen to live in an apartment building like the one in “The Imposter”: two identical structures that stand on either side of a driveway, facing one another. When I first moved here, I got turned around all the time; I don’t have a particularly good sense of direction, and I’m always daydreaming and not paying attention to where I’m going. So one day, I wandered into what I thought was my building, but wasn’t. It was a very uncanny experience. The lobby decorations, both main level and on my floor, were the exact same, but something was slightly off, and I kept trying to figure out what it was. The whole time, I kept thinking things like, I feel like the elevator is slightly off-center from where it usually is or, That’s weird, did they move that table to the other wall? When I got to my door, even that looked a bit different – something was different about the doorknob, like the color was slightly off. I stuck my key in the lock, but when I went to turn it, it wouldn’t. I did this a few times before I finally realized that I’d walked into the wrong place and was at someone else’s door! It had never occurred to me before then that the two buildings would be so exactly identical, so it hadn’t even entered my mind that I could possibly be in the wrong place. A couple weeks later, a woman and a child from my apartment number in the other building came to my door. I answered it, and she was incredibly confused. Neither of us have ever made the mistake again.

Afterward, I just kept thinking about it. It’s so hard to describe how uncanny it was, and the feeling really lingered. I truly felt for a moment like I’d stepped into some alternate universe, like all the little details of my world had shifted just slightly, almost imperceptibly. It felt like an elaborate prank—all my neighbors teaming up to move things just the slightest bit, only enough for it to feel confusing, but not so much as to feel like a different place entirely. The story came to me pretty quickly from there. I started thinking about this feeling and digging into it, imagining these opposing buildings as portals, as sort of fun-house mirrors of one another, and thinking about what might happen if someone who wanted out of their life walked into that fun-house mirror and preferred the reflection.

2. What were some of the factors that influenced you to submit to our Festival?

I’ve always thought the Tennessee Williams Festival sounded and looked like such a fun time, and I loved that a part of the prize involved going to the festival itself! I’d recently had some luck in other contests and was feeling emboldened to submit to more, and when I saw this one was accepting submissions, I had a feeling it could be the right place for this weird, queer, surreal story. I’m familiar with Chin-Sun Lee’s work, and when I saw that she was the judge, I felt like there was a chance she’d click with this story and understand what I was trying to do. I definitely didn’t expect to win, but I was so thrilled when I did!

3. How did it feel to find out you were the winner?

I completely freaked out! I jumped around and let out a shout (sorry to my neighbors). I was home alone, so the first thing I did was text my husband (who was in a class at the time, or else I would’ve called) with a lot of exclamation points and some quick-fingered typos. Then I called my oldest sister, who’s also a writer, so that I could freak out verbally.

As a funny add-on: The night before I got the news that I won, I bizarrely had a dream that I’d won the contest. In the dream version, I found out I’d won by receiving a giant scratch-off ticket in the mail, and when I scratched it off, it said “1st Place!” When I saw I’d won in real life, I also couldn’t stop laughing at what an odd coincidence (or psychic prediction???) that was. Anyway, I think next year the contest should consider sending news to winners via giant mailed scratch-offs, just to spice things up.

4. What were some of your favorite things about attending the Festival?

I really loved getting to see the winning one-act play performed and see the very short fiction winner read as well! It was great to get to be there and to meet the other winners and the wonderful people who put this whole thing together. Also, slightly outside of the festival itself, I had some of the best meals I’ve had in a very long time in New Orleans, hands down. Specifically, I will be dreaming about the carrot marmalade yogurt at Molly’s Rise & Shine for the rest of my life and am already plotting out how I could attempt to recreate it, since I tragically live too far to eat it on a regular basis. So that was a highlight as well!

5. What are you working on now?

I’ve just wrapped up revisions on the novel I’ve been at work on, Terrestrials, which is about a group of people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens, their partners who are struggling to navigate their loved ones’ new belief systems, and their children who are raised within this controversial belief system, and follows them across 30 years. When I say just wrapped up revisions, I mean just—it’s only been a few weeks! I do my best work when I give myself stretches of relatively intense, active writing followed by stretches where I let myself just breathe, read a lot, think, play around with ideas that may or may not go somewhere, and just generally gather creative inspiration. So, I’m currently in a creative absorption moment.

6. Do you have any new publication news you’d like to share?

I just recently had a flash creative nonfiction piece come out in Split Lip, which is an excellent magazine I’d encourage any/everyone to go read!

 

Kate Tooley, 2025 Very Short Fiction Winner

1. What inspired you to write your piece?
So, I always describe it as the “sex in a dog bed” story, but it’s really a twist on the classic self-discovery-after-life-falls-apart narrative. While the piece is entirely fictional, I did actually see a very fancy bed for XL dogs while I was shopping for a new mattress a few years ago. I won’t pretend I didn’t consider it, so on one hand there was just the “what if” factor. But this was also back when Writing Twitter was still alive and well – I’d stumbled onto a thread about how all sex in writing was gratuitous – didn’t move the plot along, etc etc and all these people piling on agreeing as was wont to happen on Twitter. And I got so irritated – I had the thought: I bet I could write a story where all the character development and narrative motion comes from sex and where you need the “graphic” details for it to do that work. Little Animals is what came out of that. I looked back and what’s here is nearly identical in content to the first draft. I added a few lines of backstory in editing and fine tuned it obsessively because you have so little margin for error in flash, but this story knew what it wanted to be from the get go.

2. What were some of the factors that influenced you to submit to our Festival?
I’ve been hugely interested in Tennessee Williams since high school. The way he links repression and violence hit home for me in a big way, even before I could articulate what that meant for me personally. So that’s what caught my eye, just the idea that the conference existed. It also helped that the judge was Annell López, whose short fiction I knew and admired. And then learning about the Saints & Sinners conference – it felt like TW Fest would be somewhere I was safe and that the story might be welcome. I don’t submit to many contests, but I got a good vibe from this one (pardon my Pisces) and I’d never been to NOLA, so I decided to go for it. For the record, the vibes were absolutely correct.

3. How did it feel to find out you were the winner?
I have an awful memory, but I’m fairly sure I saw it on the site before I found the email, and, as a superstitious author, refreshed the page multiple times. Then I found the message from Morgan Hufstader, who was truly so kind and lovely about everything. I really was thrilled, and it was a few days before my birthday, so great timing for me personally. I’m sure I told my partner first, I’m always massively embarrassed to share news like this with anyone else.

4. What are you working on now?
I’m editing a novel about a woman who’s trying to solve her aunt’s murder, but the catch is that her aunt is haunting her and as the novel goes on, possessing her for progressively less and less justifiable reasons – a lot of body horror, a lot of complicated family dynamics. I’m also back to toying with the idea of a flash/micro collection hinging on my obsession with strange nature facts.

5. Do you have any new publication news you’d like to share?
I just had a micro come out in Tiny Molecules, “The Summer the Lake Flooded and the Alligator Drowned.”