We are honored and excited to announce this year’s Emerging Writer Award recipients. Each year we present three prizes that recognize emerging writers who possess exceptional talent and demonstrate potential for lasting literary careers. A jury of past winners, KWLS board members and staff, and trusted readers reviewed hundreds of entries over the course of multiple rounds.
The Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award for a short story goes to Jack Foraker; the Scotti Merrill Award for poetry goes to Valerie Perrault; and the Marianne Russo Award for a novel-in-progress goes to Jackie Chalghin.
This January the winners will join us for the 2026 Seminar: Pay Attention!/ The Novel and our Writers’ Workshop Program.
Thank you to everyone who applied — we encourage you to keep writing and submitting — and to all our readers for offering such insightful feedback. To the rest of you: keep your eyes out for these gifted and disciplined writers in the months and years to come!
CECELIA JOYCE JOHNSON AWARD
for a short story
Jack Foraker is a writer from Yolo County, California. His writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House, Aspen Words, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and UC Irvine, where he received an MFA degree. His fiction is forthcoming in the Iowa Review. He lives in San Francisco and is working on short stories and a novel.
The final judge was Cecelia Joyce Johnson. “The author’s narrative in conveying the trauma of stalking the coyote was polished, unsentimental and truly excelled,” she wrote. “The affirmative denouement of the story had philosophical implications and, surprisingly, was broader in scope but at the same time, matter of fact.”
SCOTTI MERRILL AWARD
for poetry
Valerie Perreault is a poet and visual artist whose work blends storytelling, ancestral folklore, and the humor and strangeness of the Western cultural story. She is the winner of the 2024 Richard Snyder Memorial Book Prize and was a finalist for the New Letters Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry and the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. Her debut collection of poetry, Neon Pastoral, was published in October 2025. Her writing has appeared in Zone 3, Swamp Ape Review, Bluestem, and Delmarva Review, among others.
Perreault’s art is held in private collections worldwide and has been featured in Goop, Hia Magazine, BuzzFeed, and PBS Art Loft, with permanent installations in spaces such as the Ritz-Carlton South Beach, InterContinental Miami, and Royal Caribbean. She grew up in Illinois, graduated from the Art Institute of Dallas, and, in 2012, settled in the Upper Florida Keys.
The final judge, Billy Collins, wrote: “These delightfully lively poems feature a very interesting voice that speaks directly to the reader, yet is just unreliable enough to provide lots of surprises as the poems veer and jump from ironic to serious to kooky and back. As with a riveting movie, I was afraid I would miss something if I blinked.”
MARIANNE RUSSO AWARD
for a novel-in-progress
Jackie Chalghin was the 2024–25 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she received an MFA degree in Creative Writing (Fiction). Her work was longlisted for the 2024 DISQUIET Prize. She is currently working on a collection of stories and a novel.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin, the final judge, wrote, “[This excerpt] deftly portrays the dual losses of the protagonist’s mother and the protagonist’s connection to her ancestral land. The text provides a master class in navigating voice, with all the nuance, grief, and knee-slapping humor a talented author could hope to bring to the table. Energetic and pleasurable.”
Winners of the Emerging Writer Awards receive full tuition to the Seminar and Writers’ Workshop Program, round-trip airfare, full lodging support, a $500 honorarium, and the opportunity to appear on stage during the Seminar. We will begin accepting submissions for EWA 2027 in March 2026.
