Announcing our winners!

Please join us in congratulating the 2025 Coppice Prize winners!

First place: Miranda Diaz, “Birthright”

Second place: Anastasia Jill, “Opossums Driving U-Hauls”

Third place: Sydney Sirkin, “Barry’s Saloon”

Honorable Mention: Andleeb Shadani, “The Chinese Doll”

Short-list

Amita Basu, “Of Rats and Women”

Martha Patterson, “The News”

Yong Takahashi, “Residency”

Efembe Eke, “Something for Everything”

Ariyah April, “Into the Light”

Emilio Cabral, “Effigy”

Long-list

Neethu Krishnan, “Crab Mirror”

Cassondra Windwalker, “I Was An Irrelevant Man”

Susan L. Lin, “Exchange Students”

Iram Moazzam, “If I Let You Go”

Alexis Clifton, “Small Talk Elegy/Eutawville Ode”

MV Fabiyas, “Shelter With the Peanut Shells”

Elim Lee, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”

Mia Fang, “Red, White, and Blue, Except Red is All That Matters”

Nathan Long, “Moons of Jupiter”

Keenan Guy, “Ventriloquist”

We’re going to be celebrating our winners and launching our anthology at a party on Friday, June 20 at 6:30 p.m. at So & So Books in Raleigh. We hope to see you there!

about the Coppice Prize

The Coppice Prize is an annual short story competition run by the Redbud Writing Project. Every year, we invite writers around the world to submit a short story, up to 4000 words, for consideration. Past judges include Kelly Link, Clare Beams, Joanna Pearson, John Kessel, Makenna Goodman, Beth Morgan, Alison B. Hart, and Jill McCorkle. Winners receive a cash prize and publication in our Coppice Prize anthology.

In 2025, the Coppice Prize was open from March 1-March 31. This year, thanks to a generous grant from United Arts, we revamped the contest to have a special focus on uplifting marginalized and under-represented writers. Here’s what that looked like:

• The contest was only open to writers who identify as belonging to marginalized or under-represented groups (e.g. cultural identity, income level of your family, racial identity, gender identity, disability, or something else). We will leave it up to individual contestants to decide if they identify as marginalized or under-represented. If you’d like to talk this out with us, please feel free to reach out.

• As always, the contest was free to enter.

• Winners and the finalist received review and feedback from a literary agent. Winners also received $600 (first place), $300 (second place) and $100 (third place).

Meet our Judges

Anise Vance is a writer from the African and Iranian diasporas. His debut novel, Hush Harbor, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Camden. As a Mitchell Scholar, he received an MPhil in Geography from Queen's University Belfast. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and currently lives in North Carolina with his wife and two children. 

Rafael Frumkin is the author of two novels, Confidence (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and The Comedown (Henry Holt & Co., 2018), as well as the short story collection Bugsy & Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Confidence was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of the Washington Post’s Best Works of Fiction of 2023, and named one of the best books of the year by both CrimeReads and Them. The Comedown was optioned for small-screen adaptation by Freddie Highmore and Regina King, and then by SONY Trident. Raf spent five years as a professor of creative writing and is now a full-time novelist, essayist and screenwriter. 

Aamina Ahmad was born and raised in London, England. Her first novel, The Return of
Faraz Ali, was named a notable New York Times pick for 2022 and went on to win the
Art Siedenbaum Los Angeles Times First Book prize, The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain First
Book prize, and the Gordon Bowker Volcano prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
she has been a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a Pushcart Prize, and a
Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. She is also the author of a play, The Dishonored. She teaches
creative writing at the University of Minnesota. Her collection of short stories is forthcoming from Riverhead in 2026.

agent review

Jade Wong-Baxter of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency will provide feedback and coaching to this year’s three winners and honorable mention.

Why did we decide to revamp the contest?

Oftentimes, the people who have the most access to the arts are the ones who need them the least. The arts are an incredible source of catharsis, healing, and empowerment, but too often, they are restricted to those who already hail from highly educated, upper middle class backgrounds. We've seen over and over again how our classes specifically serving writers who hail from marginalized communities have transformed those writers: our students have regularly told us that our classes have changed their lives. 

Having a deadline in the form of a contest, as well as an opportunity to win a cash prize and publication, is often incredibly motivating for writers. We believe that offering this contest, as well as the training sessions, galvanizes writers from this community and brings them further into the world of creative writing. In addition, this contest gave ten finalists the opportunity to have their work reviewed by nationally renowned judges, and three winners the opportunity to see their work published, share it with the public, and receive feedback from a literary agent. The publishing industry is still incredibly wealthy and white, and we're incredibly excited about the possibility of giving three marginalized writers the chance to launch a career.