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.”
Nonfiction
Winner: Catherine Malcynsky with her story “The Other Janes”
Runner-up: HeeJee Yoon with her story “Biopsies from a Homesick Body”
About nonfiction judge Youmna Chamieh:
Youmna Melhem Chamieh is a French-Lebanese writer and editor whose work centers on the crosscurrents of memory, place, and imagination. Her writing has been featured in Harper's Magazine, British Vogue, the Financial Times, Zoetrope, the Harvard Lampoon, and Harper's Bazaar, among other publications. She has contributed to acclaimed film and television releases at Stay Gold Features and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Guernica, an award-winning magazine dedicated to global art and literature.
Chamieh’s words on “The Other Janes”:
Catherine Malcynsky’s The Other Janes opens with a question from the narrator’s mother: “Is this the motherfucker?” What follows is a stark, intimate testimony that turns the language of police reports, family phone calls, fragmented memories, and internal monologue into an examination of all the ways sexual abuse corrodes and festers a victim’s self-concept over time. “I once read that it takes seven years for all the cells in a human body to die and regenerate,” Malcynsky writes. “After all that molecular reincarnation, trying to recall the details is like peering through frosted glass.” This forensic, shame-tangled quality—a hallmark of traumatic memory—lies at the heart of this essay’s singular force. Indeed, shame hovers perpetually above this piece, weighing it down into endless footnotes and self-annotations; but the writing mounts a formidable resistance, anchoring itself in every section to the hard work of naming: naming the “motherfucker,” naming the failure of law, naming complicity and silence. In prose that is sharp-edged and darkly observant, Malcynsky’s remarkable essay thus gives shape and texture both to her own injury and to those of the “other Janes,” whose spectral presence in the piece takes it from a powerful act of testimony to a gesture of collective witnessing.
Chamieh’s words on “Biopsies from a Homesick Body”:
HeeJee Yoon’s lyrical Biopsies from a Homesick Body operates like a restless and recursive self-diagnosis, its titled sections probing toward a map of homesickness that is at once bodily, historical, and linguistic. From the institutional chill of Columbia’s “green of grey” copper roofs to a grandmother’s careful ritual of making ssam, Yoon’s prose is flooded with sensory detail caught between a disembodied self and the steady mooring it longs for: “She would fold it all together with the precision of love itself, her hands gentle but firm, and then she would lift her other hand, resting it just beneath my chin urging me to open my mouth.” Moments such as this fall like a soft balm on the narrator’s world of contingent blueberries and artichokes, drawing the reader inside a nostalgia so thick it oozes. Winding between New York dorms, California suburbs, and Korean gardens, Yoon’s striking essay ultimately draws its power not only from its painful pull away from the homesick body, but also from its dogged push toward the language that might make such a body habitable.
We want to congratulate all the winner and runner-ups, alongside everyone else who participated this year!
