2025 C&R Press Awardees, Shortlist, and Longlist in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction.
We are pleased to announce our 2025 awardees, shortlist, and longlist in Poetry! (Fiction, and Nonfiction.coming soon).
Each year C&R Press awards $1000 for a book of Poetry, $1000 for a book of Fiction (Novel or Short Story Collection), and $1000 for a book of Nonfiction (Memoir, Essay, or Creative Nonfiction) along with publication of selected manuscripts. C&R Press also hosts two Chapbook competitions each year.The 2026 Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Contest is open now! C&R Press also holds open submissions for full-length manuscripts in each genre throughout the year. To see our other published titles please click HERE.
2026 C&R Press Awards are open in every genre on January 1, 2026.
The Press congratulates the 2025 awardees, the shortlists and longlists, and notes that the selection process was full of strong writers across all genres with a very high quality of writing.
Please see some of our author’s honors, awards, and accolades HERE!
POETRY AWARD
Ocean St. Amant In all my dreams my angels give me wounds give me miracles
About In all my dreams my angels give me wounds give me miracles
A book of poems that refuses consolation, this collection moves through grief, desire, violence, faith, and extinction with an unflinching philosophical intensity. Written from inside loss rather than beyond it, where language becomes both instrument and wound, and survival itself feels provisional. Drawing on lyric, prose-poem, and fragments, the book maps a mind testing how much can be said when belief collapses and meaning thins. What emerges is not confession but confrontation: a stark, intimate reckoning with being alive in a world that offers no final shelter.
About Ocean St. Amant
Ocean St. Amant is a poet, editor, and publisher. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Vows Publishing, an independent press dedicated to contemporary poetry, and has previously served as editor-in-chief of Electric Literary Magazine. His work has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Therapy Zine, and Goldscript Co., and he was shortlisted for the Steel Toe Books Chapbook Prize in 2023. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections.
2025 POETRY AWARD SHORTLIST and LONGLIST
The press congratulates everyone on the shortlist and longlist and notes that the selection process had many manuscripts worthy of publication, and the press wishes it could publish more work.
Poetry Shortlist
Nnadi Samuel
Alejandro Escudé
Jose Carpizo
Poetry Longlist
Stephen Priest
Carol Ellis
Medina Durakovic
Jacqueline Balderrama
Daniel Meltz
Myfanwy Williams
Sharanya Naik
Jana Harris
Suzanne S. Rancourt
Ede Clarke
Austin Sanchez-Moran
Ryan Tilley
Drema Drudge
NONFICTION AWARD
Khalisa Rae Knee Length
About Knee Length
Knee Length is a bold, lyrical essay collection and memoir about growing up Black and Midwestern inside Christian school hallways and church pews — where skirts were measured, silence was praised, and desire was something to pray away.
But in the quiet corners of girlhood, another education was unfolding.
Between the harmonies of TLC, the glossy ambition of America’s Next Top Model, and late-night episodes of Dawson’s Creek and Gilmore Girls, Khalisa Rae wrestled with curiosity — about sex, sensuality, shame, and where a Black girl with questions fit in a culture obsessed with the body. Raised by devoted matriarchs who taught her holiness and survival, she learned how to be “good.” She also learned to want more.
Braiding memoir, pop culture, and cultural critique, Knee Length traces Rae’s journey from repression to reclamation — culminating in the full-circle liberation she finds in Heaux Tales. It is a story about breaking silence, honoring inheritance, and discovering that faith and desire were never meant to be enemies.
About the Khalisa Rae
Khalisa Rae is an award-winning poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and the author of Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press), a searing meditation on faith, girlhood, and inheritance. As a multi-Pushcart nominee, her work has appeared in Typehouse, PANK, Southern Humanities Review, Rhino, and Tishman Review, among others, and has won the Appalachian Arts and Entertainment Award.
Rae is a Publishing & Marketing Fellow with Wise Ink Creative Publishing and previously served as Theater & Literature Director at the North Carolina Arts Council. She is the co-founder of the nationally recognized Griot & Grey Owl Black Southern Writers Conference. Her work explores faith, Black womanhood, desire, and the radical work of becoming.
2025 NONFICTION AWARD SHORTLIST and LONGLIST
The press congratulates everyone on the shortlist and longlist and notes that the selection process had many manuscripts worthy of publication, and the press wishes it could publish more work.
Nonfiction Shortlist
Anatoliy Shumilov
jacob werblow
Ciel Downing
Anna Vodicka
Nonfiction Longlist
Anne Panning
Sammie Downing
Xiaoyu Gao
Jianan Graybill
Morgan Rose-Marie
Carletta Joy Walker
Josh MacIvor-Andersen
Wei ZHOU
Alexandra McIntosh
Zac Showers
Sahil Verma
Gregory Spatz
FICTION AWARD
Briá Purdy The Harebell
About The Harebell
A woman boards a boat heading for an unnamed island. Her only instructions are to observe and keep a record of the dying native plant life. Haunted by memories of the past, carrying out an increasingly hopeless and incongruous task, she begins to wonder about the people who brought her here and why she was sent to watch everything die. Until one day, she discovers a new, thriving plant and must confront what it means for all she believed about the impossibility of a future.
Evoking the lyrical style of Bluets by Maggie Nelson, the cross-genre prose of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken, and the post-apocalyptic story-telling of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Harebell is a thought-provoking and poignant novel, exploring our relationship to nature, grief and memory at the end of the world.
About Briá Purdy
Briá Purdy is a writer and artist based in Los Angeles. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been published in Sans. Press, Speciwomen, The York Literary Review, The Queen’s Review, The Nomadic Journal, To Be Magazine, among others. She is the founder and editor of The Head of a Woman, a surrealist print zine founded in Paris, France.
2025 FICTION AWARD SHORTLIST and LONGLIST
C&R congratulates everyone on the shortlist and long-longlist! These are some amazing manuscripts as well. The selection process was very difficult and yet enjoyable as many manuscripts appeared worthy of publication; we wish we could publish more work!
Fiction Shortlist
Thomas M. Atkinson w/ Blackfish lake
Marjorie Sandor w/ The Singing Bones of Braehouse
Michael Keen w/ The Terminal Stage
Alyssa Quinn w/ Notes From The Island
Donna Wojnar Dzurilla w/ Switchback and Other Stories
Fiction Longlist
Kent Nelson
Khan Ha
Ashish Kaul
Trudy Lewis
Elizabeth Mayer
Mackenzie Sanders
TJ Gerlach
Ed Falco
Carrie Grinstead
Nathan Leslie
Matthew Lansburgh
Mehdi M. Kashani
LONG LIVE BOOKS!