Every year, Orison Books publishes Best Spiritual Literature, a collection of the finest spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals the preceding year. The anthology also includes previously unpublished work by the winners of The Best Spiritual Literature Awards. (Subscribe here.)
We are pleased to announce the winners and finalists for The 2024 Best Spiritual Literature Awards! The winners will each receive $500 and publication in the 2025 volume of Best Spiritual Literature.
FICTION
Winner: Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, "Pagoda at the End of the Earth"
Selected by Amit Majmudar
Judge's Citation: "This story has enough plot and pathos to be expanded into a novel. Dramatic recognition scenes, loss and dislocation, tragedy and devotion, spirituality and politics... What made this story stand out was how much storytelling it did. I particularly appreciated the poem-like way in which the titular pagoda bookends the story, in spite of the passage of years from its beginning to its end. This is a story that has architectural unity, a deep design that befits the moniker 'best spiritual literature'—its creative order mirrors the order that religion reads into the universe."
Finalists: Stephen Policoff, "Goodbye, Valentino"; Patricia Schultheis, "Everything Passing"
NONFICTION Winner: Sadia Khatri, "the width of the neck"
Selected by Susanne Paola Antonetta
Judge's Citation: "'the width of the neck' takes off from the Shah jo raag, the poetry of Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai sung communally every day at his shrine. Khatri describes the experience of hearing the raag as being 'ripped open,' exactly the beauty and ambush I felt reading this essay. It leaps, it dances, it rejoices—and it takes us at the neck, that place where mind meets heart, prose meets poetry." Finalists: Trileigh Tucker, "Dipper"; Gabriela Valencia, "Repurposed Building"
POETRY Winner: Amy Fleury, "Holy the Hospital"
Selected by Sarah Ghazal Ali
Judge's Citation: "This litany attends to both the sacred and sanitized by turning a close eye to the hospital, a space often too mired in fear or pain to write into with such depth and care. To sanctify a hospital with such meticulous and wondrous attention is a feat—holy the poet's spiritual capaciousness, holy the hospital rendered by her hands."
Finalists: Adedayo Agarau, "Ecclesiastes in which Job Sings of Hunger"; Amogha, "Reading Rilke at Ogden Point"; Brook Bhagat, "Ghazal on Fire"; Richard Brostoff, "How To Find An End"; Susan O'Dell Underwood, "God as Glacier"
About the Winners
Left to right: Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, Sadia Khatri, Amy Fleury
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a pile of ginkgo leaves in a trench coat and the author of Fablemaker (Gaudy Boy, 2025). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks, Monsoon Daughter and Unsprung, were published by Thirty West Publishing House (2022) and Newfound (2023) respectively. She received her MFA from The University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was The Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is from Yangon, Myanmar.
Sadia Khatri is a writer, filmmaker, translator, and organizer from Karachi, Pakistan. She films and translates with Amrit Pyala, a film project archiving mystic poetry and folk music in Pakistan. A co-founder of the Pakistani feminist collective Girls at Dhabas (2015-19), Khatri is also a film critic and an alum of The Locarno Critics Academy and Berlinale Talents. Currently, she's an MFA student at The University of Minnesota.
Amy Fleury is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Beautiful Trouble and Sympathetic Magic, both from The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry at Southern Illinois University Press, and a chapbook, Reliquaries of the Lesser Saints (RopeWalk Press). Recent poems have appeared in Image, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals. She lives and teaches in the Chippewa Valley of Wisconsin.
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The 2025 Best Spiritual Literature Awards will be open for submissions from May 1 – Aug. 1, 2025.