COUNTERCLOCK

2023 Winners

Thank you to everyone who submitted and to our poetry and prose judges—William Fargason, Emily Pittinos and Ghinwa Jawhari—and congratulations to our 2023 CCWA winners and finalists! Works will be published in Issue 15, coming out on March 16.

POETRY

Winner | Kaylee Jeong, “Four Stories About My Body”

Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong is from Oregon and lives in New York.

Runner-up | Anya Maria-Johnson, “Looking at the Earth From a Small Galaxy of Meanness”

Anya Maria Johnson is a Brooklyn-based writer and an MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College. Anya has held editorial positions at several journals––currently, she is the Poetry Editor at Exposition Review and an Associate Editor at Fonograf Editions. Her most recent publication, “Our Hysterical Country,” for which she won the John B. Santoianni Prize for Excellence in Poetry, is available on poets.org.

PROSE

Winner | Alexandra Leiseca, “A Native Tourist”

Alexandra Leiseca is a graduate student in Emerson College’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts program. She has written culture and identity-focused blog posts for a Chicano activist in Santa Barbara and is on the nonfiction editorial team for Redivider literary journal. Alexandra is a proud Chicago native and was influenced by her diverse upbringing to use writing to bring about change from a young age.