We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2026 Terrain.org Editor’s Prizes, selected by poetry editor Derek Sheffield, nonfiction editor Elizabeth Dodd, fiction editor Pam Houston, and editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin.
One prize of $500 per awardee is given annually in poetry, nonfiction, and fiction for a contribution from the previous year by a writer of color, member of the LGBTQ+ community, woman, and/or member of another marginalized community whose contribution explores place particularly in the context of social, environmental, or climate justice.
Please join us in congratulating these writers—and if you haven’t yet read these powerful and important contributions, read them now!
2026 Winners
Poetry
Annie Wenstrup for the poems “Heshkegh Ka’a” and “Exhibit 10: Polyphemus Moth”
Last night I dreamt the apocalypse. He came weeping in my / living room. He asked to stay. He asked for a story. I played / him a recording. My dead great-aunt spoke and his chest rose / and fell while he listened. She taught us to make a tea with / heshkegh ka’a. Boil the powdered root with water, let it draw / the illness away…
Nonfiction
Chrysanthemum Brook Watkins for the Letter to America essay “Paddling Through Hell: Florida’s Nonbinary Wetlands”
I think of places like Graham Creek as fundamentally nonbinary places. Not quite land or water, but somewhere in between. A creek, but also a floodplain. Fresh water, but tidally influenced. A question mark on maps made by people who need their rivers to run in orderly lines across the landscape. I see most of Florida (the places left undeveloped) as fundamentally queer spaces, and that is one reason I’m always excited to paddle Graham.
Fiction
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey for the short story “Houseplants”
“Can you crack a window?” says the venus flytrap. “It smells like a graveyard in here.” This is a lie. A graveyard smells like dirt and pine sap and grass clippings, and Lucy’s apartment smells like nothing so pleasant.
About the Winners
Annie Wenstrup is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories and the recipient of a 2025 Whiting Award in poetry. She held a Museum Sovereignty Fellowship with the Alaska Office off the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, supported through a Journey to What Matters grant from the CIRI Foundation, and was an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, and elsewhere.
Chrysanthemum Brook Watkins is a trans poet/writer, environmentalist, and the author of The Drag Gospel of Queer Jesus (Saturnalia Books, 2026). A Sundress Publications and Elk River Writers Retreat Fellow, and a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Chris graduated from Florida State University with her Ph.D. in poetry and a concentration in ecocriticism and gender studies. Chris’s poetry and essays have appeared in such publications as Poetry, Ecotone, and the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day series.
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant living in Munich, Germany, where they are a Visiting Scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. A 2026 recipient of the Adroit Journal’s Anthony Veasna So Scholarship and a Monarch Queer Literary Award winner, their work appears in publications such as Split Lip, SmokeLong Quarterly, and The Cincinnati Review. Their writing explores human-nature relation and deconstructs binaries casting humankind in opposition to the natural world.
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Header photo by Nina Lozej, courtesy Pixabay.
