Winner of the 2025 AHP Rising Writer in Fiction Prize

April 4, 2025

Autumn House is excited to announce the winner of our 2025 Rising Writer Prize in Fiction: Magdalena is Brighter Than You Think by Grace Spulak, selected by K-Ming Chang! The collection will be published in April 2026.

Grace Spulak is a fiction writer based in New Mexico. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2021), was awarded Witness Magazine’s 2021 Literary Award in fiction, and has appeared in the Ploughshares Blog (2023), Nimrod (2023), Witness Magazine (2021), Pembroke Magazine (2021), Southwest Review (2020), and Arkana (2020). Grace has received financial support from Trillium Arts and New Mexico Writers. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

We’d also like to congratulate the finalists and semi-finalists for their incredible manuscripts and thank everyone who submitted and trusted us with their manuscripts.

Thanks also to the judge, K-Ming, for all her hard work.

FINALISTS

I Don’t Think I’ll Miss You Much by Alida Dean

Budapest | Budapest by Michelle Donahue

Let All Our Ghosts Depart by Meghana Mysore*

To the Lasting House by Riley Rockford

Spaghetti Man by Sam Schieren

SEMIFINALISTS

The Aughts by Leslie Bazzett

Children of Crows by Aja Duncan

Proof of Giants by K.T. Peterson

Kissing in the Dark by Jackie Reitzes

Discipline: Twelve Stories by Geeta Tewari

INTIMACY ISSUES by Jenna-Marie Warnecke

*indicates a manuscript that was withdrawn

Filed under: Prize