The Tampa Review editorial team is excited to announce that our guest judge, Ayana Mathis, acclaimed author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie and The Unsettled, has selected a winner for the Danahy Prize for short fiction.
This year’s winning story is “Milk Bottle Churches” by Jay McKenzie. McKenzie’s work appears in adda, Maudlin House, The Hooghly Review, Fahmidan Journal, Fictive Dream, and others. She recently won the Fish Short Story Prize, was runner up in the Tom Grass Literary Award, and has won, placed, or shortlisted in competitions including the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Her novel How to Lose the Lottery will be published by Harper Fiction in March 2026.
Of the winning story, Ayana Mathis says:
Heartbreaking. Lyrically and beautifully written. This writer shows a deep facility with storytelling and knows when to reveal and when to withhold. The characters were well-rendered. The story’s use of figurative language was gorgeous, and more importantly, this writer understands that such language can be used to evoke the mood of the story as a whole, not merely the sentence or clause in which it appears: “On the sepia-tinted west bank of the Ex . . .” or “. . . a dress that looks like a week-old bruise . . .” Time is also handled incredibly well; though the story’s current action takes place years after that fateful summer, those events haunt this story. The writer cleverly shows us how much the present is beholden to the past. I can’t think of a better macro-metaphor than the titular milk bottles thrown into the sea so long ago: one still carrying its message, the other smashed on a shore thousands of miles away.
Please join us in congratulating Jay, and we hope you’ll keep us in mind when submissions open once again in the fall!
Thank you all for sending us your work.