Moon City Short Fiction Award

The 2025 Moon City Short Fiction Award

The editors of Moon City Press congratulate Emily Rinkema of Burlington, Vermont, for winning the 2025 Moon City Short Fiction Award competition for her book, Dead Mother Card! Emily will receive the $1,000 cash prize and see her book published by MCP in early 2027.

Emily’s bio: Emily Rinkema lives in northern Vermont. Her stories have recently appeared in Cutleaf, Moon City Review, Milk Candy Review, and Wigleaf and have been selected for The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. You can read more at https://www.emilyrinkema.com/ or follow her on BS or IG @emilyrinkema.

Runners-up in the contest include Timothy Boudreau and Zachary Tyler Vickers.

Thanks to everyone who entered. We received a record number of submissions this year, so many of them worthy of this honor. We are excited to be a publisher in this extremely exciting time, with so many talented writers.

Past Winners Of The Moon City Short Fiction Award:

2024: Joel Hans, The Bedtime Emptying of Our World

2023: Avitus B. Carle, These Worn Bodies

2022: Lee Ann Roripaugh, Reveal Codes

2021: Michele Finn Johnson, Development Times Vary

2020: Andrew Bertaina, One Person Away From You

2019: Pablo Piñero Stillmann, Our Brains and the Brains of Miniature Sharks

2018: Amanda Marbais, Claiming a Body

2017: Kim Magowan, Undoing

2016: Michelle Ross, There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You

2015: Laura Hendrix Ezell, A Record of Our Debts

2014: Cate McGowan, True Places Never Are

All titles are available through the Store page.