2025 LORIN TARR GILL WRITING COMPETITION WINNING ENTRIES
Results of the 2025 Lorin Tarr Gill Writing Competition
The Honolulu Branch of the National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW) is proud to announce each of the winning entries in our 2025 Lorin Tarr Gill Writing Competition. There were 68 entries across the three categories, with 28 in poetry, 19 in fiction, and 21 in nonfiction. Winning entrants received award certificates along with cash prizes of $200 for First Place, $100 for Second Place, $50 for Third Place, and $25 for Honorable Mention.
The six judges—2 in each category—read coded submissions for anonymous review, reaching agreement on their decisions which were then communicated to the chair of the competition, Luanna Meyer. The judges also provided us with the wonderful comments included in this announcement about each of the winning entries.
First Place in poetry was awarded to our Member Joy Au, for her poem My Father’s Hands: Hukilau. The judges note how her poem animates the power of intergenerational, place-based knowledge and complimented her clear, unhurried, and attentive writing.
Second Place went to Michelle Shin for Possibilities, awarded for the poem’s intriguing turns of phrase, locating us in a place of memory even as the poem remains carefully attentive to the particular right before our eyes.
Shawnee Greene-Duarte was awarded Third Place for What Faith is Like which explores the ways our various forms of commitment and belief can be at once willful, attentive, questioning, intimate, and surprising.
Friend Elsha Travis received Honorable Mention for Family Tree: in these times of violence and censorship, her poem reminds us that writing can transform silence into action. Here, the judges comment, the persistence of fragment and catalogue enact the persistence of self.
Fiction:
First Place in fiction was awarded to Kristin McAndrews,
Speaking of Tongues. The judges note: In this story’s playful, accomplished writing, they liked the portrait of Marcia Ann Sweet aka “Band-aid” as a character and her contrast with the very immature, pre-adolescent “Buckshot”, also nicely drawn. More interesting is the playfulness of the author’s many allusions to “tongues”: the sharp things people say to one another, the narrator’s self-censorship—holding her tongue until the end, when she will give her tongue to everyone, including Band-aid and Buckshot…. The mother has found a way to hold her tongue and also serve it to the whole family.
Second Place went to our Member Marcia Zina Mager for Ruthie and the Witch Doctor. This is a comedy of virtue tempted and lost or not, with characters that are, by convention, stereotypes. Ruthie’s immaturity—old enough to marry but too young to lie to her parents—portends trouble as she slips off to Africa with her “wildly rebellious over-sexed cousin.” What could go wrong?
Jeffery Ryan Long was awarded Third Place for Nausea, a well-conceived piece of fiction with interesting, individuated characters…. We don’t know what to feel about the shallow, condescending character who is deliberately fore-grounded except dislike. His “nausea” seems to be caused by the people around him, or more probably by his own life as someone who is emotionally vague, as is his wife and marriage.
Honorable Mention goes to Member Patrice Wilson for Calla’s Story. The judges note that in this emotionally ambitious story, an estranged sister’s life, now that she’s dead, is discovered by Blair who makes for an interesting contrast with Calla. For the sake of a good story, Blair must earn her tears and our sympathy at the end by going deeper into her self-discovery.
Nonfiction:
In the nonfiction category, First Place was awarded to Member Marcia Zina Mager for Belonging, with the judges commenting FABULOUS and BRAVA! The flow of the narrative was natural and intimate, telling everything that needed to be told and not a thing that didn’t. This led to a climatic description of a kind of epiphany experienced by the writer that was…vivid, gorgeous, and profoundly moving. The very ending message—life-transforming for the author—is a gift for both the writer and for us, her readers, that strikes resonance in our human hearts long after putting down the pages.
Second Place was awarded to Friend Tamara Moan for Ka Ipu for a narrative that blends together all of the writer’s talents, starting off with autobiographical elements and weaving themselves throughout until the author is chanting confidently in the last sentences. The combination of the profound and the incidental—chanting in a parking lot, the unexpected handing over of the ipu after a family ceremony, the anecdotal yet insistent references to genealogy—captures how important it is to recognize kuleana in every aspect of life, however apparently trivial or important. This is a personal yet instructive and generous piece.
Third Place Member Sabra Rae Feldstein for Hanging Bear. The judges comment that more than style or structure, what stays with a reader are images, or particular moments, and Hanging Bear has these in abundance. From the little boy on the swing dressed in a rabbit skin vest, to the title bear—perhaps—making an appearance in the last sentences, this story vividly presents the lifestyle the family has chosen; the conflicts, real and imagined, with the interlopers; and at an imagined distance, the experience of the bears. The story grants readers a window into life choices that few of us would have the courage, or the audacity, to make.
Friend Elsha Travis received a second Honorable Mention for America. This single page of writing flows like a stream of consciousness from a person who is newly arrived to this country—maybe one who is not a native speaker of English—definitely someone whose experience of life has been structured by other cultural and social pathways, with very different expectations of how to shape her or his future life—or, simply, how to act in order to fit in. This is an unusual and acutely insightful take on our country and our world. We want to hear more from this writer.
Our Honolulu Branch of the NLAPW acknowledges and thanks the Gill family, whose generous donations have supported this biannual writing competition for many years in honor of the late Lorin Tarr Gill, a prolific author of numerous works on Hawai‘i and elsewhere. A special thanks is extended as well to the six judges who generously shared their literary expertise and professional experience in reaching competition decisions within tight timelines. Appreciation also goes to longstanding Member Shan Correa, who skillfully prepared the Award Certificates she so graciously contributed gratis to this important branch event.
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Email:luanna.meyer@vuw.ac.nz