Noise as the unknowable and affective. Noise as the discordant, the messy, the simultaneous, the inside and outside, the personal and political. White noise, cosmic noise, noisemakers, noise control, noise pollution. What floats around us, apart from and embedded in overworked signifiers and the ever-present compulsion to make sense? What breathing room does noise offer? What the hell is going on here? Did you hear that?
Sonora Review is excited to announce the winners of our annual contest. Many thanks to our winners for sharing their work, our judges for their time and care, and all of the amazing writers that submitted. It’s a privilege and an honor. Please look out for their work, to be published later this year.
2025 WINNERS: SONORA REVIEW NOISE CONTEST
Antonio Santi, “Static” (fiction)
- On Santi’s story, judge Steven Dunn writes, “I was stuck in my chair with my vocal cords and chest tight while reading Static. I was afraid that if I started crying like I needed to, that I might spiral. Static feels like the truest thing I’ve read about a person trying/denying grief in an environment that warps your sense of humanity, time, and distance. I hate that I know this feeling, but I love that Santi was able to articulate it because I haven’t been able to. Static accomplishes this by allowing the syntax to be as wild and messy and unpredictable as the grief and power it’s exploring.”
Martha Graham Wiseman, “The House is Quiet” (nonfiction)
- On Wiseman’s essay, judge Sarah Minor writes, “‘The House is Quiet’ is an essay ringing with the din of a reading mind. In it, Wiseman writes about silence by averting her gaze, by peeking around its corners and trying to name it from other angles. Pessoa, Stevens, and Dickens are with her in the yawning rooms she wanders, weighing the absences of autobiography, the depth of every plosive, the silent clamor of a death toll. ‘The poem allows the past tense to find an opening into the present’ writes Wiseman, like someone entering a recently vacated room. In ‘The House is Quiet,’ silence becomes a loud kind of wanting, an ache that ‘amplif[ies] the quiet’ of missing rooms.”
Amy Raasch, “ontology of llorando” (poetry)
- On Raasch’s poem judge Dao Strom writes, “I found myself both moved and captivated by the intricate musicality of ‘ontology of llorando,’ and by the swift, precise, curious stream of images hinting at complex histories while also ducking and weaving, swirling, emitting and omitting, plying currents of both noise and sense. In this poem, language and lineage weep and bleed together, wending their way in a columnar stream of words that both flows and breaks, catching on its own gaps of white space but always tumbling on, and somewhere in this stream of many fleeting impressions of sounds and places a daughter also surfaces, grasping towards an articulation of ‘salt’ and ‘untranslated song.'”
FINALISTS
- Claire Tafoya, “How to Cut the Fat” (1st runner up, fiction)
- Jerico Lenk, “there’s nothing like a florida sunset” (1st runner up, nonfiction)
- Jill Talbot, “Staring at the Silence” (2nd runner up, nonfiction)
- Oak Morse, “A Portrait of Black Man Wrestling With His Secret Self” (1st runner up, poetry)
- Michele M Miller, “Tongue” (2nd runner up, poetry)