Announcing: Winners of the 2026 Online Contest
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the Columbia Journal’s 2026 Online contest:
Fiction
Winner — “The Wild Ones” by Jaime Gill
A moving, funny, and most of all hopeful account of a young boy seeking personal salvation on the off chance that he might capture an award-winning photo of a beast. This story unfolds masterfully, sentence by sentence, effortlessly letting us into lives that feel already fully formed, owing in part to the writer's remarkable control over the way we're navigated through time and community. But the story's greatest strength lies in the rare specificity of how loneliness and hope might collide in the imagination of one bullied child, standing exactly at the cusp of personhood, and just beginning to recognize it as his own. What a gem.
Runner up — “Otter Watching” by Sarah Ang
“Otter Watching” captures precisely the humiliation of young love, of being regarded without dignity, and the way desolation can become its own gravitational force. Here, the world narratively bends around a heartbroken girl, who cannot help but read personal relevance into the lives of the otters she watches, even as she actively attempts to maintain a policy of noninterference. Psychologically astute and with immense fidelity to the experience of processing heartbreak, the story uses water — as habitat, vehicle, and body of fear — as a throughline that c
Poetry
Winner: “The Wanderer in You” by Jed Myers
Such a slender, arresting poem that at once sees, perhaps, both itself (its speaker), and also me, its reader (a reader, any reader). Tendril-ly minimal in form, but maximal in its sonic delight, “The Wanderer in You” peels back the layers of a self to unfurl the textured symphonies previously hidden: “ceiling the solarium / dome of your skull // roof a loose thatch / of shifting flightpaths . . .” This is a poem of exquisite details—one that notes “those ears behind your ears”—it detects, senses beyond the five senses: it knows what is present beyond the present moment: it perceives across time.
Runner up: “INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE LITTLE BROWN GIRL WHO HOLDS THE FUTURE” by Thomas Kneeland
In the words of the poem, “There’s treasure there/ Soil of a hundred fires & a shard of nautilus shell.” This poem is sweeping in its precise scope: from the ocean’s depths and churning waters to fish caught in a net, painted “on pockets of a guayabera.” Its varying repetitions like overlapping waves along a shoreline: ephemeral and unforgettable.
Nonfiction
Winner: “On My Hands and Knees” by Christhalia Wiloto
"On My Hands and Knees" by Christhalia Wiloto offers a first-person snapshot of a layered, driven narrator, financially and educationally at a standstill in unaffordable New York City. Blending the personal essay and historical research with wit, grace and humor, Wiloto tugs deftly at the thread between art and propaganda, and the responsibilities and limits of complicity embedded in our family and national inheritance.
Runner Up: “The Guitarist in the Best Band in Winona” by Kevin Fenton
"The Guitarist in the Best Band in Winona" is a heartfelt and powerful tribute essay turned obituary-of-extraordinary-length. Without flinching, the essay's bittersweet note comes through its tribute to childhood friendships across class boundaries and the American maladies of depression, hyper-individualism, addiction and shrinking opportunities.
We want to congratulate all the winners and runner-ups, alongside everyone else who participated this year!
