Sonora Review is proud to announce the winners of our 2026 Annual Contest with the theme of Memory. Each winner will receive a $1,000 prize. Winners and runners-up will also be published in Sonora Review, forthcoming this summer. The editors would like to thank all contestants for sharing their work with us, as well as the judges for their generosity of time and spirit.
2026 Fiction Prize
Winner: “Salt” by Luc Le
Judge Zach VandeZande
I was deeply moved by this story’s blend of myth, grief, and renewal. The main character of “Salt” both is and is not the girl in the myth her mother tells, as was her mother, and in exploring that simultaneous connection and dissociation, the story arrives at a core truth about the immigrant experience and the experience of anticipating grief—there is no escaping the feeling that you are the betrayer when the world goes on around you, is made for you—even as it allows for the possibility of something truer to grow. This story is powerful in its lyricism and deft in how it draws the reader into its themes.
Runner Ups: “Breathless” by John Weir and “Behind the Casita” by Suzanne Larsen
2026 Poetry Prize
Winner: “Braced Against the Current” by Grace Lynn
Judge John A. Nieves:
“Braced Against the Current” presents a complex view of memory as we see from “now” what happened “then” while knowing of the repercussions of a mother’s cancer diagnosis. Innocence and hope in memory play hard against the fear in both the past and now. Even in the line breaks we see this tension: “We are trying to earn back our luck/ by leaving our bodies/ to the wind that swims.” This poem makes the urgency of memory something “bright.
Runner Up: “Dil Soz—” by Homa Mojadidi
2026 Creative Nonfiction Prize
Winner: “Siblings & Strangers” by Karo Ska
Judge Margo Steines:
What happens when systems of racism and empire intervene upon the quiet lives of ordinary people, this essay asks, delivering the violent devastation of a parent losing a child slowly, through a narrative lens that positions our protagonist as participant observer to her own family life. I found it wrenching and insistent in its commitment to naming the harms committed against her family, and the agents of that harm. The prose is intimate and familiar and cuts persistently to the emotional core. I won’t soon recover from reading this.
Runner Up: “Ars Poetica” by Summer Wrobe