Jamila Osman Wins Summer Creative Nonfiction Contest

Jamila Osman has been named the winner of the 2025 Summer Nonfiction Essay Contest for her essay, “Dream Girl.” Taneesh Kaur’s essay “3, 7, and 37” and May Teng’s essay “Flood Days” were chosen as honorable mentions.

Osman will receive a prize of $1000, and her essay will appear in the Spring 2026 edition of the journal.

Jamila Osman is a Somali writer, multimedia artist, and educator. She has taught creative writing from Portland to Palestine, from summer camps to juvenile detention facilities. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She is the recipient of the 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction from The Bellingham Review, the 2021 Flash Nonfiction Award from Black Warrior Review, and the 2019 Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbook A Girl is a Sovereign State (Akashic, 2020) and her work has appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies.

The contest was judged by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of the New York Times best-selling illustrated collection of nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments, which was chosen as Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year and named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. Nezhukumatathil also wrote four previous poetry collections: Oceanic, Lucky Fish, At the Drive-in Volcano, and Miracle Fruit. With the poet Ross Gay, she co-authored the chapbook Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review. Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. Nezhukumatathil is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program where she received the faculty’s Distinguished Research and Creative Achievement Award.

Of Osman’s essay, Nezhukumatathil said, “’Dream Girl’ is a haunting, incandescent elegy that moves like a slow dance between grief and tenderness. It’s about loss, yes—but also about the stubborn miracle of being alive inside that loss, of still reaching for sweetness even as the world dissolves around you. The writer’s attention to language, to lineage, to the sacred work of remembering and forgetting—my goodness. Reading this elegant remembrance, I felt the living and the dead holding hands.”