2025 TWFest Fiction Contest Finalists
Congratulations to our 2025 Fiction Finalists, Winner, and Runners-up!
Thanks to our fiction judge, Chin-Sun Lee, and our contest coordinator, Morgan Hufstader.
Pictured above from the top, left to right, our finalists are:
Sarah Ang is a writer from Singapore. She has won multiple international and national awards for her writing, including first place in the Wilbur Smith Author of Tomorrow Award, first place in the National University of Singapore Creative Writing Competition, and first place in the iYeats International Poetry Competition,, among others. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Mithila Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Best Asian Short Stories, Idle Ink, Alexandria Quarterly, Medusa’s Laugh Press, and Eunoia Review, among others. She received her B.A. in English Literature from University College London. Find her at sarahangwrites.com.
Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer is the author of the poetry collection Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and others. Her fiction is forthcoming in Giving Room Magazine and The Masters Review. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in poetry and is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at New York University.
Jody Callahan is a fiction writer and past recipient of an Edith Wharton-Straw Dog Writers Guild residency. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Writer’s Digest, Gemini Magazine, Southword, and Epiphany, among others. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Hailey Rose Hanks is a writer and teacher from middle Tennessee. Her work can be found in Carve Magazine, The Pinch, Salt Hill, and Hippocampus and has received support from Tin House Workshops. She has an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.
Bud Jennings completed the graduate creative writing program at NYU and his work has appeared in Complete Sentence, Hobart, New Letters, Beyond Queer Words Anthology, Word Riot, Gertrude, Superstition Review, and other publications. He was a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant finalist and received two residencies from the Blue Mountain Center. After several years as an instructor at a lycée in Paris, he returned to his native Massachusetts, where he taught at the high school and university levels. He retired from teaching in June and lives in Salem, where he and his husband are the obedient minions of two rescue cats. He recently completed a novel set in Paris.
Carolyn Mikulencak lives in New Orleans. Her stories and essays have appeared in such places as The Oxford American, Psychological Perspectives, and Southwest Review. Her chapbook, Center of the Universe, was published as #17 in the Belle Point Press Prose Series. She has an MFA from the University of New Orleans.
K.P. Moody lives in Chicago with three elderly yet sprightly tabby cats. She has one adult daughter, equally spry, who lives out of state. A special education teacher in the Chicago Public Schools by day, culture enthusiast by night, Moody’s writing draws inspiration from the works of Tennessee Williams, Edna O’Brien, and David Foster Wallace. Often found staring into space, drenched in the theories of Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, and Erwin Schrödinger, Moody occasionally allows their concepts to drive or shape her writing. She is currently working on a two(?)-act play with entr’actes featuring conversations between herself and Harry Houdini. Moody is delighted, no, positively flummoxed – but honored – to have received this recognition from the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival in the category of short fiction. (Moody would also like to mention she’s a firm believer in the Oxford comma and takes no offense to the use of dashes in creative writing – or bios.)
RUNNER-UP: Originally from rural Mississippi, Megan Morrison is a multi-disciplinary writer currently living in northern New Mexico. She holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and is the co-creator of the podcast Nobody Reads Short Stories. Her fiction has been published in Nashville Review, The Maine Review, Kestrel, Peauxdunque Review, and elsewhere. She is also the co-founder of Erosion Films, a production company dedicated to increasing the climate conversation through comedy, family-friendly musicals, and campy horror (erosionmade.com). Megan is a member of the Writer’s Guild of America and is currently working on a novel.
RUNNER UP: Freelance writer Lance Nixon writes mainly about the Plains and the West from his home in South Dakota. A former newspaper reporter and editor, magazine editor, and UPS truck driver, he is now a research analyst for the South Dakota Legislative Research Council, the nonpartisan entity that researches and drafts legislation at the request of state lawmakers. He was the winner of the 2021 J.F. Powers Prize in Short Fiction from Dappled Things Magazine. He has twice been one of twenty semifinalists for the Iowa Short Fiction Award of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has master’s degrees in English and journalism.
Wendy Peterson is a multi-genre writer who received her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Stony Brook University. She has a B.A. in Literary Studies from Delaware Valley University. Her writing has been published in Maudlin House, The Thieving Magpie, October Hill Magazine, The Southampton Review, and The New Absurdist.
WINNER: Katie Henken Robinson is a Boston-based writer and the Associate Editor of Nonfiction at Electric Literature. Her writing has appeared in Grist, Hooligan Mag, Prism Review, Autofocus, and elsewhere. In 2024, she was named a finalist in fiction for the Missouri Review Perkoff Prize and the American Literary Review Awards. She is a graduate of Boston University’s fiction MFA program and is currently at work on a novel and collection of short stories. You can find her at katiehenkenrobinson.com.
Laura Steadham Smith’s short stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, StoryQuarterly, and Pleiades, among other magazines. Her fiction has won an AWP Intro Journals Prize, the George M. Harper Award, and the Hamlin Garland Fiction Award. She lives in southwest Alabama with her family, where she teaches high school literature. She is at work on a novel.
