bestmicrofiction 2026

Diane Seuss's sixth collection is Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press 2024), a finalist for the National Book Award, and on the shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021) was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Pen Voelcker Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Four-Legged Girl was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She received a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2021 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Seuss is a chancellor for the Academy of American Poets. Her seventh collection, Althea: poems, is forthcoming in 2027. She was raised in rural Michigan, and has lived for many years in Kalamazoo, where she was Writer in Residence at Kalamazoo College.

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.