For the third year in a row, Torch is elated to nominate six Torch Features for The Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize has been published every year since 1976 and showcases small presses from all over America. Torch Magazine has been featured in the publication every year since our nominations began in 2022. It is a true testament to the work that Black women produce and the importance of amplifying their work through our online magazine. You can learn more about the prize here. 

Our Amazing Torch Nominees Include:

“Banana Trees/Sunflower Seeds” by Erica Frederick

“Track One (Kick, Push III)” by A.E. Wynter

“Exhaustion Whispers Tough Luck to The July Child” by Sydney Mayes

“Biafra Song” by Chidima Anekwe

“Black Girlhood” by Chyann Hector

“Excise” by Mon Misir

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About Torch Literary Arts

Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established with love and intention in 2006 to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Torch has featured work by Toi Derricotte, Tayari Jones, Sharon Bridgforth, Crystal Wilkinson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Elizabeth Alexander, and others. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, workshops, an annual retreat, and special events. 

Help Torch continue to publish and promote Black women writers by donating today.

About Erica Frederick

Erica Frederick is a queer, Haitian American writer from Orlando, Florida currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in fiction from Syracuse University and writes about being big in all the ways there are to be big—in body, in spirit, in Blackness, in Florida suburbia. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Tin House, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, VIDA, Lambda Literary, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. She is well at work on her first novel, Fight in the Night.

About A.E. Wynter

A. E. Wynter is a Black, Jamaican-descended writer and editor from New York. She is also a community organizer and currently lives in Saint Paul, MN where she has curated multimedia art exhibits, writing workshops, and readings, among other events. Wynter has received multiple grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board and was a fiction fellow in the 2021-2022 Loft Mentor Series. Winner of the 53rd New Millennium Award for Poetry and The Florida Review 2024 Editors' Award in Poetry, her poems have also appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review and Water~Stone Review. Wynter was a 2023 resident at the Carolyn Moore Writers Residency.

About Sydney Mayes

Sydney Mayes is a poet from Denver, Colorado. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Atlantic, Poets.org, The Iowa Review Blog, Gulf Coast Journal, Obsidian, Denver Quarterly, Booth, and Prairie Schooner. Mayes won the 2021 Iowa Chapbook Prize for her chapbook You Look Just Like Your Mama. She was selected by Roger Reeves as a finalist for the 2024 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. Executive Editor of Nashville Review, Mayes is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Vanderbilt University. Follow Sydney on Instagram.  

About Chidima Anekwe

Chidima Anekwe is an emerging writer hailing from the old coastal town of Stratford, CT.  She is a recent graduate from Yale University with a B.A. in English Language & Literature and a concentration in Creative Writing. For her work, she has received support from the SAEF Grant and the DuPuy Prize, and has been nominated for a MacNelly Award for Literary Arts. She writes to explore new postcolonial poetics and Black feminist existentialisms within contemporary American girlhood, usually with a satirical bent. She has read for The Yale Review and edited for DOWN, a BIPOC-centered webzine, among others. She is currently based in CT and gaining experience in NY.

About Chyann Hector

Chyann Hector is a Black Jamaican-American writer and educator based in the DMV. She has been writing ever since she could remember and wrote her first novel in a spiral notebook in the 5th grade. In her work, Chyann prioritizes the voices of Black women who are immigrants and descendants of immigrants. She also explores multi-generational relationships, mental health, and culture in her writing. You can find her on Instagram and TikTok: @chyiswriting.

About Mon Misir

Mon Misir (she/they) is a queer Black British writer and recovering lawyer based in London, UK. They use their writing to explore facets of their experience as a black woman, with a speculative bent. When not writing or editing others’ work in various writers groups, they enjoy reading, theatre (musical and otherwise), and learning how to wield a longsword. They have work published in or forthcoming with the Decolonial Passage and Midnight & Indigo. You can find their links here: https://bio.site/Nomonbooks or follow them on Instagram.

About The Pushcart Prize

The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America - including Highest Honors from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.

Media Contact Information:

Brittany Heckard

Communications Associate

bheckard@torchliteraryarts.org 

(512) 641-9251