bestmicrofiction 2025

Dawn Raffel is the author of six books. Her latest, Boundless as the Sky, is a collection incorporating flash, micro-fiction, and images in its exploration of early 20th Century history, amid the rise of both fascism and technology.

Previous books include The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, The Secret Life of Objects, two other collections of very short stories, and a novel in vignettes. She has taught creative writing at International Literary Seminars (previously Summer Literary Seminars) in Kenya, Russia, Lithuania, Georgia, and Canada, as well as at Columbia University and at the Center for Fiction in New York. She has also had a long career as a magazine editor, including at O, The Oprah Magazine, which she helped launch, and at the Northwest Review, where she recently served as fiction editor.

Her work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including BOMB, Conjunctions, O, The Oprah Magazine, Big Other, Fence, NOON, The Quarterly,The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Providence Noir, Best Small Fictions, New Micro, and Best Microfiction.

Meg Pokrass is the author of 7 flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, 2 flash-novellas and 2 new co-written collections of flash, Picking Up the Moose, co-written with Jeff Friedman (Pelekinesis, 2022) and Disappearing Debutantes, co-written with Aimee Parkison (Outpost 19, 2023). Her work has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and international anthologies including Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Washington Square Review, American Journal of Poetry, McSweeney's has appeared in 2 Norton anthologies of the flash fiction form: New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015). Meg is the Founding Editor of New Flash Fiction Review, Flash Challenge Columnist for Mslexia Magazine, and teaches private microfiction workshops.

Gary Fincke’s books have won The Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction, The Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, and the Elixir Press Fiction Prize. His latest collections are The Sorrows (Stephen F. Austin, 2020) and The Out-of-Sorts: New and Selected Stories (West Virginia, 2017). His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in such periodicals as Harper’s, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Missouri Review as well as in Best American Essays 2020 and Best Small Fictions 2020.