Top row, left to right: Andy Chen, Emily Crossen, Daniel Abiva Hunt; bottom row, left to right: Angie Romines, Gurmeet Singh, Annie Wenstrup.

It is with enormous pleasure that we announce the finalists for the tenth annual New England Review Award for Emerging Writers: Andy Chen, Emily Crossen, Daniel Abiva Hunt, Angie Romines, Gurmeet Singh, and Annie Wenstrup.

Andy Chen was born and raised in New Jersey. He is a Kundiman graduate and holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His poems appear in Ploughshares, december, the Offing, and Denver Quarterly, and his reviews appear in Hong Kong Review of Books, Hyphen, and Colorado Review. He teaches at John Burroughs School in St. Louis. 

Emily Crossen’s short fiction has appeared in Ecotone and Zoetrope, where she received first prize in the 2022 Short Fiction Competition. She holds a PhD in English from Rutgers. She lives with her family in California, and she is working on a novel.

Daniel Abiva Hunt holds an MFA from the University of Houston. His writing has appeared in the Masters Review, CRAFT, Maine Review, Portland Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati. 

Angie Romines is a writer, teacher, and Dolly Parton enthusiast living in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, two sons, and emotionally needy rescue pup. She received her MFA from Ohio State University, where she now teaches in the English department. A recipient of the Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, Angie has published her prose in the Rumpus, Image (Good Letters), the Columbia Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of essays that explores the dark histories of Kentucky women in her family tree.

Gurmeet Singh is a British, working-class writer of color based in Berlin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Sand, Sinn und Form, 3am Magazine, and elsewhere. The story featured in this edition of New England Review was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport short story prize. He is currently working on a novel.

Annie Wenstrup lives in Fairbanks, Alaska. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Nimrod, Palette, and POETRY. She is an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow and an Inuit Art Quarterly Art Writing Fellow. She has also received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, and Storyknife.

The New England Review Award for Emerging Writers provides a full scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August 2024 and is given annually to an emerging writer who offers an unusual and compelling new voice and who has been published by NER in the past year. The winner will be announced in March.

Congratulations to all six finalists!
We are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in 2023.