2025 Breakout! Writers Prize Winners
We are pleased to announce the winners and runners-up for the 2025 Breakout! Writers Prize which brings visibility to the creators of our literary future by honoring and supporting distinct student voices in poetry and prose. Each winner receives $1000 and publication in the next print issue of Epiphany Magazine.
Thank you to this year’s prize judges: Hilary Leichter (prose) and Victoria Chang (poetry).
This year’s winners are Julia Oschwald Tilton in prose, and Alice Liang in poetry!
In poetry, the runner up was Amritha Selvarajagaru and finalists include Vasvi Kejriwal, Rona Luo, and Oak Morse. In prose the runner up was Rema Shbaita and the finalist is Audrey Obuobisa-Darko.
You can read the winning writers’ work along with that of certain finalists and runners up in the next issue of Epiphany Magazine.
Thank you to everyone who submitted to this year’s Breakout! Writers Prize.
Prose Breakout! Prize Winner:
Julia Oschwald Tilton
Julia Oschwald Tilton is a nonfiction writer from the Midwest. She is an MFA candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing Program, where she was a College of Liberal Arts Fellow. Julia lives with her husband in Minneapolis and is working on a memoir about pregnancy loss, adoption, and the fraught complexities of making a family. Her work and progress can be found at juliaoschwaldtilton.com.
About Oschwald’s winning piece, Hilary Leichter had this to say:
“I was so impressed with the sincerity of these pages, their velocity, and the matter-of-factness of tragedy and grief. ‘Fertile’ is a beautiful example of the way a single word, when examined carefully, can contain multiple registers of beauty, pain, and promise.”
Poetry Breakout Writers Prize Winner:
Alice Liang
Alice Liang is a poet based in Brooklyn by way of China and Michigan. Her work can be found in publications such as The Rumpus, The Margins, and The Seventh Wave. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and is the associate poetry editor at West Branch. She also makes crossword puzzles which have appeared in several major news outlets.
About Liang’s winning poems, Victoria Chang had this to say:
“Alice Liang's poems are equal parts perceptive and imagistic. Poems such as ‘Because I am a physicist's daughter’ display an accretive lyricism: ‘That a father's love is a function/of wonder and of waiting.’ Poems such as ‘Speech Acts’ explore language, learning and forgetting, as well as the possibilities of words: ‘The day is yellow. The tree is open. The sky is many.’”
