On Wednesday, April 30, SUNY Oswego students Marie Sova and Lily Tringali will cohost the 2025 Subnivean Awards event honoring six international literary competition finalists and naming winners in poetry and fiction. This virtual event, featuring readings by the finalist authors, will be free and open to the general public.

“I am excited to see the announcement of who won!” said Sova, who joined the staff of SUNY Oswego’s literary magazine Subnivean this spring. “I enjoyed doing the talent scouting and reading different stories and poems and helping get the writers to submit their work. It made me feel like my opinions, and stories I liked, felt heard and seen. And I also learned that this is something I might want to do after graduating, and do it in person to help create a digital magazine or journal.”

“Working on Subnivean has been a uniquely rewarding experience, proving that the literary community thrives even in digital spaces," Tringali added. "Staffing the journal remotely required us to get to know each other through words alone, much like the anonymous submissions we looked at. There’s something thrilling about not knowing who wrote the winning pieces, it levels the field and reminds us that great writing speaks for itself. I’m just as eager as everyone else to hear the winners! This virtual event is a celebration of voices we’ve heard and read without ever seeing faces, and that’s the magic of it!”

Subnivean publishes a variety-filled curation of poems and stories submitted by writers around the globe, and this year’s literary competition is no exception. The 2025 Subnivean Awards finalists are authors Madeline Rosales, Michael Loyd Gray, B. Fulton Jennes, Neha Rayamajhi, Sara Burnett and Jaime Gill. Their writing gives voice to a broad range of experiences and themes, and the five authors themselves live and work in far-flung locations — from Washington state, South Carolina, Maryland, Boston and Connecticut in the United States to East Sussex in England.

The final judges, however, are local. In celebration of the magazine’s fifth anniversary, this year’s judges hail from SUNY Oswego’s Central New York region: judging in poetry is Albert Abonado, author of the 2024 National Poetry Series book "A Field Guide for Accidents." Judging in fiction is Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, who has a new book forthcoming from Macmillan on the heels of her novel "Off the Books," which earned positive reviews from The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly and others, and was included in Bustle's "Most Anticipated" roundup.

 Visit this link to learn how to view the virtual event. 

To learn more about the magazine or international literary competition, visit Subnivean online.

-- Submitted by the Department of English and Creative Writing