Announcement: 2026 Breakout Prize Winners
This year’s Breakout Prize was the most competitive in recent history, and our dedicated team of volunteer readers and editors pored over hundreds of talented submissions across both categories. Thank you to all who submitted, to our passionate team at Epiphany, and to our esteemed judges. We are proud to offer $1000 and publication to each winner.
we are pleased to announce that the 2026 Breakout Prize winners are Nico Amador in poetry, selected by Cynthia Cruz, and Imogen Osborne in prose, selected by Alexandra Kleeman.
Both winners will appear in Issue 37, December 2026. Read the winning poems.
2026 Breakout Prize in Poetry
selected by Cynthia Cruz
Winner: Nico Amador
Runner-up: Carolene Kurien
Finalists: Perry Levitch, Daniel Blokh, Juan Garza, Joshua Zeitler
On her selection, judge Cynthia Cruz wrote “Nico Amador’ poems move seamlessly between the speculative—the momentary leap in to the void, outside time and space—and the particular of the everyday which is to say the singular encounters each individual must face. These beautiful and necessary poems’ rich texture is exemplified in ‘Before Surgery,’ when the poet writes, ‘A hospital glows near the overpass. / Everyone in bed there wears a gown. / When faced with the prospect of change, / I’m not brave.’”
About the Winner
Nico Amador’s recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the LA Review of Books, Adroit, American Poetry Journal, West Branch, Pleiades, and 44 Poems on Being with Each Other: A Poetry Unbound Anthology. His chapbook, Flower Wars, was selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press. He holds an MFA from Bennington College and is a recipient of the Blue Mesa Review Poetry Prize, the Outpost Vermont Fellowship, and the Lambda Literary writing residency. He's currently a 2025-26 Emerging Artist Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
2026 Breakout Prize in Prose
selected by Alexandra Kleeman
Winner: Imogen Osborne
Runner-up: Sammi Chiyao
Finalists: Chidimma Ewelukwa, Liz DeWolf, Jane Kim, Lucy Marcus, Sama Bhimji, Audrey Jiggetts, Magdalene Kennedy, Rajasree Biswas
On her selection, judge Alexandra Kleeman wrote “Osborne’s storytelling has a sinewy elegance, a deceptive straightforwardness to the voice and tone that immediately begins to fold and pleat in captivating, unexpected ways. What emerges is a complex, beguiling examination of the strange resemblances and stranger intimacies that undergird life, puncturing the illusion of individuality, loss, and recovery. This story is the sort that follows the reader for quite a while, through grocery store aisles and into the private, unexplored crevices of heart.”
About the Winner
Imogen Osborne writes poems and stories in Ithaca, NY. She is a recent MFA graduate of Cornell’s creative writing program, where she was an editor of EPOCH journal and recipient of the 2024 Robert Chasen Memorial Prize and the James McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award. She has taught creative and critical writing to college students and incarcerated adults and is a 2025 Poetry Foundation Visiting Teaching Artist. She is currently working on a poetry collection and a novel, an excerpt of which was selected by Tania James as winner of the 2024 Master's Review Novel Excerpt Prize. She was born and raised in Bristol (UK) and holds a degree in English Literature from the University of Cambridge.
About the JudgeS
Cynthia Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German Language and Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and a PhD from the European Graduate School where she wrote her dissertation on Hegel and madness. She is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame.
Alexandra Kleeman is the author of the novel Something New Under the Sun, Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2022. Her second novel, Something New Under the Sun, was named one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2021. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and other writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Djerassi, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. She is an Associate Professor at Cornell University and a Contributing Writer at the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Ithaca and Colorado with her husband, Alex Gilvarry.
