The Georgia Review congratulates Rochelle L. Johnson, who was selected by judge Allegra Hyde as the winner of the Georgia Review Prose Prize, and Rosa Boshier González, who was chosen as runner-up. Johnson will receive $1,500 for her essay “Phantom Pains.” Rosa Boshier González will receive $600 for her short story “2nd Dad.”
Of Johnson’s essay, Hyde wrote:
“Reading ‘Phantom Pains,’ I couldn’t stop highlighting lines. The essay offers such profundity, such wisdom, through frank and compassionate engagement with uncertainty, unknowingness, and grief. Weaving together the experience of amputation with the experience of teaching in the face of a devastating and unrelenting environmental crisis, ‘Phantom Pains’ takes readers on the journey of enduring loss, but also of rebuilding community and connection. I finished the essay feeling both moved and inspired. ‘I had decided that I would no longer mask my own vulnerability,’ writes the author towards the essay’s conclusion, ‘as my students do the work of facing their own.’ As a fellow teacher, a fellow human being as well, ‘Phantom Pains’ made me want to do the hard work of revealing some of my own vulnerabilities, as a way of contributing to collective efforts to heal ourselves and our planet. I hope that other readers will feel the same.”
Rochelle L. Johnson’s “Where Ashes Bloom” won first place in the Baltimore Review’s Summer 2023 Flash Nonfiction Contest. Other essays appear in The Revelator and in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration. A scholar of American landscape aesthetics, Johnson has published her research in a variety of academic journals and books and has been supported by the American Antiquarian Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. Johnson teaches environmental humanities and writing at the College of Idaho, where she holds the Bernie McCain Chair in the Humanities. She also serves on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English. “Phantom Pains” grows out of her current book project, which shares the story of her search for a nearly forgotten early naturalist in our environmentally wounded world.
Rosa Boshier González is a writer and editor living in Houston. Her fiction, essays, and art criticism appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Joyland, the New York Times, Artforum, The Guardian, The Believer, and the Washington Post, among others. She has taught writing, art history, Latine studies, and media studies at University of Houston, the California Institute of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Rice University. A former editor-in-chief of Gulf Coast Journal, she received a Fulbright scholarship in 2021 and an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in 2024.
We would like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. More information about the contest is available here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Georgia Review Prose Prize opens again on November 1, 2025.
The Georgia Review Prose Prize Finalists
Natalie Bolderston, “Moon Widow”
Grace Chao, “Clarissa’s Dream”
Mikaela Dunitz, “My Angry, Hard, Workhorse Hope”
Anna Rimoch, “Sacrifice”