2026 TWFest Fiction Finalists

Congratulations to our 2026 Fiction Winner, Runners-Up, and Finalists!

Thanks to our fiction judge, Ladee Hubbard, and our contest coordinator, Johanna Ziegler.

Pictured above from the top, left to right, our finalists are:

Danny Thiemann has served as a staff attorney for the Programa para Campesinos at the Oregon Law Center and as a senior attorney in Earthjustice´s international program. He has taught fiction at the Writer´s Grotto Rooted and Written conference.  His fiction has won, among other honors, the Nelligan Prize from Colorado Review, the Tobias Wolff Award from Bellingham Review, the Table4 Foundation New Writer Award, and has been a finalist for the Madalyn Lamont Award from the American University in Cairo, the Kurt Vonnegut Prize for Speculative Fiction from The North American Review,  the Bridport International Story Competition in London. He has been published by AGNI as part of its To Never Have Risked Our Lives 2024 portfolio on Central America Diaspora writing, The Idaho Review, and The New Delta Review.

Dusty Dunaway is a writer from rural Mississippi. His writing was recognized by the Austin Film Festival and qualified as a finalist in the Final Draft Big Break screenwriting competition. He has a degree in architecture from Yale and now lives in Brooklyn, New York with his cat Georgia.

Christa Lei (they/them) is a writer based in New York. They are an editor at Blood Tree Literature and are Anodyne‘s Community Curator. Christa is a regular Matador Network contributor and their work has appeared in The Seventh Wave’s On Separation anthology, Door = Jar, New Words Press, HerStry and Vast Chasm, amongst others. Their work has been supported by A|S Boutique, Kenyon Review Workshops, McCormack Writers’ Center (fka Tin House), Studio Luce Guatemala, and DISQUIET, amongst others. When not writing, they are traveling and wrangling their two dogs. Find out more at christalei.me

Emilie Pascale Beck was named a Best Emerging Writer of 2024 by The Masters Review with her winning essay, “Disfigured,” which was included in an anthology published by Red Mare Press. Other writing has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Waxwing, Howlround, LA Stage, and the anthology, Snapshots (Bloomsbury). She received the Levis Prize for Fiction for her unpublished novel, The Torch Bearer, which was also named as a finalist for the 2024 Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize awarded by WTAW Press. As a playwright and director her work has been developed and produced in theaters across the country. She lives in Los Angeles and has an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson.

Lloyd Miller is a writer of literary and speculative short fiction. A twenty-year veteran of New Orleans’ entertainment and hospitality industries, he has since relocated to the hills of Western Massachusetts where he operates a rural food co-op in a town with under a thousand residents. His work has been recognized with an Author’s Fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and has been shortlisted and longlisted by Fractured Lit, with kindly worded rejections from many other fine purveyors of well-crafted fiction. [www.jlloydmiller.com

Molia Dumbleton’s work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and been awarded honors including the 2023 Granum Prize, Ireland’s Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize, the Columbia Journal Winter Fiction Prize, and selection for inclusion in the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Small Fictions, and various anthologies. She has been an Assistant Fiction Editor for Split Lip Magazine, a member of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale Foundation, a Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Summer Writers Workshop, and a reader for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and the AWP Series Prize for the Novel. She is a freelance writer and editor and teaches creative writing at DePaul University.

RUNNER-UP: Cassandra Akua Quayson is a Ghanaian American writer and graduate of the New York University MFA Program, where she was a Goldwater Fellow. She is a Writing Consultant at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, 2024-25 Poetry Coalition Fellow, and Manager of the National Youth Poet Laureate Program. She’s currently at work on a novel about movies.

S.M. Stubbs, born and raised in South Florida, owned and operated a bar in Brooklyn for twelve years with his wife Margaret. He attended Indiana University for his poetry MFA, and in January 2025, Gunpowder Press released his first book of poems, Learning to Drown. He has been nominated for the Pushcart and Best New Poets and has been a staff scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference several times. He was the runner-up in the Dappled Things 2023 J.F. Powers Short Fiction Prize, his first and only published piece of fiction. His poetry has appeared in over 50 magazines.

WINNER: Tena Laing is originally from Newfoundland, and now lives and writes in Toronto. She has also called Halifax, Quebec, Tokyo, and Calgary home. Tena won the Muskoka Novel Marathon Manuscript Contest, placed third in the Canadian Authors’ Association – Toronto National Writing Contest, and was a finalist for The Cincinnati Review Schiff Fiction Award, the Fiddlehead Fiction Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. She was shortlisted for The Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize and the Huron County Short Story Contest and was a semi-finalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Contest. Tena holds an MFA from The University of British Columbia. Her fiction most recently appears in Horseshoe Literary Magazine, and she is currently revising her first novel, along with a collection of short stories.

RUNNER-UP: John Kaufmann is an attorney and mobile home park owner who lives in southern New York State.  He is a 2025-2026 CUNY Writers Institute Fellow.  His writing has appeared in The Washington Square Review, Off Assignment, Ep;phany, Pleaides, The Journal of the Taxation of Financial Products, The Journal of Taxation of Investments, and Tax Notes.  His first novel, Leisure Living, will be published by Under the BQE Press in late 2026.  Kaufmann blogs at https://dirtlease.com.