Cover art: Anna Magruder
2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize
Guest Judge Michael McGriff on the winning poem “Stranger Fruits Grew Here”:
"One of the tenets of surrealism, from Mary Ruefle and Noah Falck to André Breton and Tomas Tranströmer, is that the line between the figurative and the empirical is abolished. Actually, it never existed in the first place! For the surrealist, everything unfolds in a refusal to operate within the agreeable systems of the world. This is why Yannis Ritsos, Peter Everwine, and Malena Mörling keep me up, late into the night, reading lines that suddenly become the dreams I once had, dreams that took a poem to guide me back a place of mystery and meaning. "Stranger Fruits Grew Here" is a surefooted and ultimately arresting poem that carries on this work. Wasima Khan knows quite well that family and the homeplace exist beyond comprehension--and certainly beyond journalistic representation. I'm haunted by this poem's confluence of image-making and understatement, by the simmering, disembodied crisis that hums just beneath its surface. This poem can speak for itself, as it should, as it does."
Art: Ali McLafferty
2026 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize
Guest Judge Camille U. Adams on the winning story “Leaving”:
“Leaving opens with one of the longest sentences in this beautiful flash piece that otherwise makes use of clauses that are punchy, concise, informational, and brief. This first sentence contains a journey and a compelling ‘why?’ question. These are enacted through its diction, its establishment of setting and location, its revelation of the speaker’s state of mind, and by dint of the protagonist’s seeming dearth of emotion.
Openly expressed affect remains—at surface level apprehension—off the page. Except, Wasima Khan utilises superb crafting because a wealth of sentiment is actually abiding in the white space. Abundant grief, longing, need, nostalgia, love, regret, and deep yearning for a now-dead mother, for a now-exiled from homeland, for now-far flung family lurk and wait. These intense emotional states are well-paced, and they travel the page with the rapt reader held under their spectral command. Then all those feelings, that the protagonist is ostensibly not expressing, break the banks. In you. I cried at the end of this evocative narrative as this mournful elegy demands.
Khan makes use of greater technique than just show not tell. Leaving is organic, diasporic call and response that puts the reader in its world and under the story’s spell. It is a work of striking immediacy. Accomplished with strong visuals, dialogue, propulsion, and attention to the sensory. We are in Kenya with this speaker, attending the funeral of his dead mother. A mother who, knowingly and sagely, speaks from the grave. A mother reaching out to a child who does not yet know his way.
I loved this piece of writing. Unequivocally. And it was my honour to select it for The Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize first place.”