The Voyage team would like to start by thanking everyone who submitted to our short story contest! We are HUGE fans of short-form YA, and hope to see this category grow more in the coming years! We’d also like to thank our contest submitters for their immense patience! It can be really tough waiting to hear back and we appreciate you sitting tight as we read through all the wonderful submissions. Without further ado, we present to you the winners of the Voyage YA Short Story Award as selected by our guest judge Natalia Sylvester, author of the YA novel, Running! We’d also love to acknowledge our finalists, and longlisters for outstanding work as well! One more huge thank you to our guest agents: Saritza Hernandez at Andrea Brown Literary Agency and Kaitlyn Johnson at Belcastro Literary Agency! Congratulations, writers!
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First Place Winner: Leslie Vedder for Phoenix from the Acid
Second Place Winner: Amanda Thomas for Sew Your Desire
Third Place: J. Isaiah Holbrook for This is How You Fall in Love with a Homophobe
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FINALISTS (in no particular order)
Allison Fradkin for I Can’t Pink Straight
Nathaniel Harrington for Illumination
Olivia Barone for Inheritance
Janie Owens for Triangle
Molly Kasperek for Chosen to Love
Sophie Trist for The Winter Walk
Paul Cullen for The Light
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LONGLIST (in no particular order)
Vincent Anioke for Dumont Circle
Jazmyne Reale for Una Foto en el Tiempo (A Photo In Time)
Alexandra Lado Roy for The Dying of the Light
Anahita Karthik for Birds in a Golden Cage
Justine Gogh for Exact Words
Emma McMorran Clark for The Nightingale’s Girl
Nikki Bennett for Summer of the Spiders
Alyson Grauer for Lavender, Juniper, Gunpowder, Smoke
Flor Salcedo for See, Right Here
Santiago Marquez for Palette
Corinna Tyris for Moon Boy, Earth Girl
Natalie Burrows for Through the Mirror Glass
Jill Young for Stuck
Chloë Fraser for Force-ripe
Kristina Pantarotto for The Apple Below Her Eye
Kimberly Anne Bussing for Locking Shut the Burning House
Ines Ayala for Game Over
Ellery Lamm for Remain
Brigette Stevenson for The Lottery Man
Niki Averton for Anna, Anna, Anna in Stone
Sky Regina for Ten Breaths of Disorder