Sonora Review is excited to announce our 2025 contest: NOISE. We invite you to send us your best. Think noise as the unknowable and affective. Think noise as the discordant, the messy, the simultaneous, the inside and outside, the personal and political. Think 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?
This year’s contest will be judged by Steven Dunn (fiction), Sarah Minor (nonfiction), and Dao Strom (poetry). Find out more at https://sonorareview.submittable.com/submit.
Check out our 2024 winners and finalists below!
2024 WINNERS: SONORA REVIEW EROTIC CONTEST
Emily Mathis, “Men Smoking” (nonfiction)
- On Mathis’ essay, judge Margo Steines writes, “‘Men Smoking’ is a fucking banger. It threads the needle on the complex felt relationship between desire and class, self and other. In its exploration of how we are taught to manage and repress what our bodies want, and of the euphoria of the spaces where we divest from that responsibility, it asks big questions about security, belonging, wanting, and the various ways masculinity is permitted to bloom under different social conditions. This essay is both smart and hot, and brings together the felt experience of adolescent sexuality and an adult analysis that is as pressing as it is sage. I loved reading it.”
Gabriel Miranda, “The Monster is God” (poetry)
- On Miranda’s poem, judge Stephanie Cawley writes, “In the middle of ‘The Monster is God,’ the poet writes, ‘yes — no,’ the dash a stark bridge where the erotic emerges, in the tension between self and other, giving in and restraint, pleasure and pain, the world as it is and the world as it could be. ‘The Monster is God’ doesn’t just write about the erotic, in its many dimensions, but evokes it. The poem itself disorients, it undoes, it flirts, it repels, it subsumes, and, in the end, it obliterates, it swallows the reader and the poem itself whole into its inky, ‘monstrous horizon.'”
Ruth Schemmel, “Women’s Wellness” (fiction)
- On Schemmel’s story, judge Bojan Louis writes, “This story expertly builds and maintains tension via the humorous exploits of a middle-aged character’s desire. While skirting elements of romantic comedy the characters of ‘Women’s Wellness’ are all aware that sex, intimacy, and the erotic might be well beyond their grasp, but despite that knowledge they persevere in their search to be touched and to be seen.”
FINALISTS
- Alfredo Antonio Arevalo, “Folklorico”
- Kayleigh Boomgaard, “Writing the Erotic”
- Kianna Eberle, “Nomenclature”
- Emerson Gray, “love-psalm”
- Amanda Nyren, “Ping-pong”
- Nicole Santalucia, “April is the Cruelest Month”