2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees

BLR is delighted to announce our 2025 Pushcart Prize Nominees. Congratulations and best of luck to these six nominees, and thank you to all BLR contributors for sharing your poems, essays, and stories in our pages!

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is one of the most honored literary projects in America. Magazines and presses are able to nominate up to a total of six pieces. Winners will be announced in the spring of 2026.

Congratulations to our nominees!

FICTION
“Bushmeat” by Chinaecherem Obor (Issue 48)
“Finding Honey” by Daniel Reiss (Issue 49)

NONFICTION
“Exene” by Kate Broad (Issue 49)
“Complications of Captivity” by Deborah Derrickson Kossmann (Issue 49)

POETRY
“Chance in Ukraine” by Nancy Kay Peterson (Issue 49)
“When Your Backache Returns” by Joseph Radke (Issue 49)

Want to read more from these writers? Explore the issues that feature their work: our 2025 contest issue and our theme issue on Animalia. Get a copy of either (or both!) and consider subscribing; you’ll get a chance to see more amazing work, including our future nominees!