Author Bio:

Susanne Salehi, MA, MFA (she/they) is an Iranian American writer who specializes in queer heroes. They are a member of Clarion West’s class of 2026, a 2025-2026 Poetry Coalition fellow, a 2025 Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellow, and a first reader for OTHERSIDE. Their work is forthcoming from or appears in After Happy Hour, Fruitslice, Frazzled Lit, By Her Sword: A Sapphic Fantasy Romance Anthology, and Nearest and Dearest: An Anthology of Dyke Domesticity.

An anthropologist by training, they remain fascinated by the human experience. If they’re not writing, they’ve likely escaped to garden. Home is with their partner and two cats in the US South, which you can pry from their humid, sweaty hands (please don’t). Find them at www.susannesalehi.com.

Judge’s Citation:

“With ‘Bond of Bones,’ Susanne Salehi manages to build a delightfully bizarre tale centered on a supernatural building and its budding new doorkeeper. Their relationship, while fated in death, does not end in tragedy but that feeling of finally knowing what it means to belong. Every new facet of Salehi’s world demonstrates careful attention to detail that offers nuanced insights into our own modern world. A surreal story, and an author I can’t wait to read again.”

—Aly Gilmore

Author Bio:

Cory Albertson is a senior lecturer of sociology at Georgia State University. He is the author of A Perfect Union? Television and the Winning of Same-Sex Marriage (Routledge, 2018). His essays and social commentary have appeared in The Rumpus (“Marital Piss”), The Bitter Southerner (“The Radical Queerness of Dolly Parton”), The Huffington Post, Interview, Out, Paste, and The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Find more out at https://cory-albertson.com/

Judge’s Citation:

“I believe the creative, restorative, and just transformation of our society will depend on our collective ability to first acknowledge, then embrace and nurture, the queerness at the core of the universe, which is to say the core of everyone and everything. We’re not anywhere close to this vision, of course, and getting closer will require great care not to appropriate a word, insomuch as it denotes an identity, that rightfully belongs to the LGBTQIA+ community. Cory Albertson’s essay ‘The Radical Queerness of Dolly Parton’ struck me as a compassionate yet direct invitation to the kind of honest grappling that such a cultural shift will involve. The result, I believe, like the ‘queerer gardens’ to which Our Lady of the Holler pointed Albertson on the path to becoming himself, will be our flourishing.”

—Christopher Martin

Author Bio:

Ashe Prevett (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Still, No Grace (Madhouse Press, 2021), which received the 2020 Madhouse Editors’ Prize and a 2022 Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as West Branch, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, and others. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets anthology, Best Small Fictions anthology, and several times for the Best of the Net anthology. She serves as digital editor for Pleiades: Literature in Context. More info at https://aprevett.com/

Judge’s Citation:

“Ashe Prevett confronts gender identity, confusion, loss, and the regard of strangers with sharp language, vivid abstraction, and formal invention. These poems open intimate worlds of possibility, weaving makeshift ladders to carry us closer to ourselves and each other. In Prevett's poetry ‘everything [is] yours to receive, to make a language of,’ and her language vibrates with the potential that each poem might become ‘everything [we] would ever need.’”

—Kurt Milberger

Author Bio:

From California, Kentucky, and Texas, Alex Chand is a playwright and poet based in Atlanta. As a queer person of color with a disability, Alex writes to fully represent, empower, and center the experience of disabled and queer people of color. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant, an alumna of Barbican Young Poets, and was a finalist for the William Robe Playwriting Residency. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Offing, Washington Square Review, and The Arkansas International. Alex holds a BA from Lawrence University, where she founded and chaired the Lawrence University Disability Working Group, an MA from the University of Leeds, and an MFA from the University of Mississippi. You can find Alex on the web at https://alexchand.com.

Judge’s Citation:

“With this ambitious work-in-progress Avonte Oquendo, Alex Chand centers the voices of the voiceless in a play that attempts to reframe the tragic death of a 14-year-old Black, nonspeaking autistic boy after he disappeared from New York’s Riverview School in the fall of 2013. Haunted by blurry security camera footage of Avonte leaving school—the last images we have of him alive—Chand breathes life into this young boy’s story through painstaking research informed by her advocacy work and reflections at the intersection of race and disability. Effortlessly referencing the music of Jay-Z and the popular video game Temple Run, Chand captures the voices of contemporary Black and Latino New Yorkers in high fidelity, all the while maintaining laser-like focus on a young, misunderstood boy’s struggle to achieve independence and be ‘cool.’”

—Albert Lee