by Sara Elkamel

for Huda Lutfi

Near the end
there are hands in the wind
and wind in the middle.

Because she demands it,
I pull the end of nothing
through the eye of nothing,

and hand nothing
back to her. Hunger
distends my tongue.

When we were young
we could never escape
the bare skin of our mothers.

Then strata of fabric
clocked them in the cold.
When I finally will say

I don’t think it’s true
my loneliness is something
I designed for myself

I’d like to imagine the wind
will run to turn back
the skin. In no time

time will eat what’s left
of the wind. I should keep
hidden from the light

the future of my hands.

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This spring, the 2026 Fiction Contest is judged by Dustin M. Hoffman. Dustin M. Hoffman writes fiction about working people. He’s the author of three short story collections: One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize), No Good for Digging (Word West Press), and, most recently, Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press). He has published more than one hundred stories in journals including Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Witness, Wigleaf, The Threepenny Review, Gulf Coast, and One Story. We asked Hoffman a few questions about how writing contests have helped shape his career, how to decide if a piece is ready to submit, and what piques his interest as a reader.

Third Coast (TC): How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests? 

Dustin M. Hoffman (DMH): My first book, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, won the Prairie Schooner Raz/Shumaker Book Prize, and it was life changing. My weird stories about working people found pages and found readers thanks to the support of University of Nebraska Press. My wonderful agent, Heather Carr, contacted me after reading this first book, which started our partnership that I treasure. For a short story writer like me, writing contests present an especially important opportunity to support the form I love so dearly, a form that might find a harder time reaching readers if not for contests with small presses and journals. I’ve been so lucky to win a couple short story contests at great magazines (Redivider and Ninth Letter). The financial support is not insignificant, and I aimed to reinvest the prize money back into my writing by buying a ton of books and paying for submission fees and just affording some time to make more art.

So, there are very practical rewards, of course, in the financial support and audience. But let’s not neglect, too, how contests offer this incredible psychological boost. We’re all spending these countless hours rattling thousands of words into a computer, deleting most of them, reshaping the rest again and again, and it’s easy to slip into feeling like these efforts might be in vain. The validation contests offer from hardworking editors and generous judges provides that beacon writers need to keep at this, to write our next great story that might have remained undiscovered.

But let’s not neglect, too, how contests offer this incredible psychological boost. We’re all spending these countless hours rattling thousands of words into a computer, deleting most of them, reshaping the rest again and again, and it’s easy to slip into feeling like these efforts might be in vain. The validation contests offer from hardworking editors and generous judges provides that beacon writers need to keep at this, to write our next great story that might have remained undiscovered.

TC: What advice do you give to a writer who’s wondering, “Is my piece ready to submit?”

DMH: My students ask me this a great deal, and I do think this is a wonderful thing a trusted teacher or writer friend can offer: the confirmation that the work is ready to go out into the world. But I still ask myself this every time I write a story. I go through so many drafts, and that’s the place a story always comes alive for me, in the revising. Sometimes it’s twenty drafts and sometimes it’s ten years, and sometimes the stories come together like magic. I’m a fan of reading a work aloud to see if it entertains me after I’ve set it aside for a while. So much of what’s worked for me is getting outside my story, separating in some way with time or voice or audience. Failing that, I love the piece of advice from Noy Holland, “If I reach a point where I am glazing over, or replacing, one day, a comma I omitted the day before, then I let the story go, for better or worse, and move on.”

I want new. I want weird. I want the story I could never have imagined would be possible. 

TC: How does your life experience inform your reading and evaluation as you read contest
submissions?

DMH: Oh, it might affect me some. I come from a working-class background. I write about jobs and the anxiety of money a great deal, because this has been such a big part of my life, and I tend to appreciate when writers recognize this part of living in our world that works us too hard. But I don’t come to reading to relate to a work. I want to learn about people’s unique experiences and cultures and voices. I want new. I want weird. I want the story I could never have imagined would be possible. 

TC: As a judge, what kind of work do you find most often piques your interest? Is there anything in particular you’d love to see from entrants? 

DMH: I love work stories and the specialized language and secret details that only someone who dwells behind the “Employees Only” can know. I also love surreal and magical works. Maybe the secret to my readerly heart is humor. It’s the gateway emotion. If you can make me laugh first, I’m willing to go just about anywhere with you. 

TC: What book is on your bedside table right now? 

DMH: I’m always reading too many books at once. What I’m reading right now: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. Two of my amazing colleagues’ books: Renée Branum’s Defenestrate and Allison Joseph’s Dwelling; I consider myself ridiculously lucky to be working with these geniuses. Adam Schuitema’s forthcoming novel Half a Million Minutes (it’s incredible!). And I just finished up Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You after loving All Fours. 

This spring, the 2026 Third Coast Poetry Contest is judged by Karyna McGlynn. Karyna McGlynn is a queer writer, visual artist, and educator, and the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books, including 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse (Lambda Literary Finalist) and Hothouse (NYT Editor’s Choice). They are Director of Creative Writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts. We asked McGlynn a few questions about how writing contests have supported their career, how to decide if a piece is ready to submit, and what piques their interest as a reader.

Third Coast (TC): How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests?

Karyna McGlynn (KM): Writing contests have been genuinely formative for me. Not just in terms of recognition, but in helping me stay in the long, often quiet middle of a writing life. Early on, even being longlisted or shortlisted helped my work become legible beyond my immediate community: editors reached out, conversations started, doors cracked open. Just as important was the confidence boost—those small external signals that I was connecting with people across the page. 

Submitting work (imperfectly, bravely) is a muscle we have to build and maintain. To say “I’m a writer” is also to say “I’m willing to let my work be read and considered.” Contests create a focused, meaningful occasion for that practice, and they remind us that putting work into the world is part of the art.

Equally vital is the practice itself. Submitting work (imperfectly, bravely) is a muscle we have to build and maintain. To say “I’m a writer” is also to say “I’m willing to let my work be read and considered.” Contests create a focused, meaningful occasion for that practice, and they remind us that putting work into the world is part of the art.

TC: What advice do you give to a writer who’s wondering, “Is my piece ready to submit?”

KM: I usually say: it should feel finished enough that you’ve made all the decisions you know how to make right now, but not so precious that rejection would stop you from writing the next thing. If you’re mostly tinkering rather than discovering anything new, that’s often a sign the piece is ready to leave home.

I also encourage writers to ask a more useful question than “Is it perfect?” How about: “Is this piece doing what it wants/needs to do?” If the answer is yes (or even a confident “mostly”), that’s enough for now! Submission isn’t a verdict. Submit your work to things. If you receive a slate of rejections, come back to it later with fresh eyes. 

TC: As a judge, what kind of work most often piques your interest? Is there anything you’d love to see from entrants?

KM: Your title is basically the first line of your poem; it needs to be strong. Don’t waste that opportunity to situate the reader and/or establish the attitude or problem of the poem. Poets are supposed to be masters of evocative compression; prove it with your title. 

I’m deeply drawn to musicality—language that has sick textures and sonics and rhythms. I’m most excited when sound is married to voice, risk, and visual specificity. I want to feel the poem leaning toward something it doesn’t already know.

My biggest piece of advice is to be more specific. Too many poems are full of vague abstraction and emotional shorthand. Think of yourself like a film director. Are you giving your readers a world to inhabit? Are there enough sensory details for them to feel transported?  

I’m deeply drawn to musicality—language that has sick textures and sonics and rhythms. I’m most excited when sound is married to voice, risk, and visual specificity. I want to feel the poem leaning toward something it doesn’t already know.

I’m not looking for a particular subject or style. I read widely and eclectically, and I’m always surprised by what hooks me. What I love most is work that trusts its own strangeness, that doesn’t rush to explain itself, and that feels awake to the pressures that shaped it. 

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by Ingrid Wendt

The first time ever I heard your six-note chatter from deep 

           inside my palm-thatched roof, no more than five minutes past

                        lights-out, ping went the strings of attraction. No night passed 

            without your bedtime serenade, and when at last we met—your tiny feet

spread wide on the bathroom ceiling, your tender skin nearly translucent (between 

            your oversized eyes and mine, invisible lightning)—I finally grasped

                        the measure of your devotion: not a bug to be seen, you were shielding

            my skin from irritation, as you also do outside, under the naked bulb that attracts

even more of them, as does Maribel’s bulb, next door, though why Maribel had fifteen

            of you one evening, when I came to call, I cannot fathom. 

                        But that same night at bedtime, as if this were an elegant, grand

            hotel, centered on my pillow, instead of a candy kiss, your greeting:

a small, black grain of rice with a tiny, white hat. Look at that, I preened,

            and went to my desk to write it down. And when the sun again splashed 

                        the eastern horizon, there, on my desk, the second! Of all the umpteen,

            randomly scattered pages, you’d chosen “Yucatán Gecko.”  Who needs

fifteen suitors competing? Eat your heart out, Maribel. My Yucatán gecko has sass.       

   

“Ode to My Yucatán Gecko” appears in Issue 55/56 of Third Coast, forthcoming Spring 2026

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Diode Editions, 2025. $18.00 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-939728-70-8

Review by Ella Reynolds

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 An achingly raw and intimate collection of personal experience and docupoetics, We Had Mansions, written by Mandy Shunnarah, combines the historical background of Palestine and its people with Shunnarah’s own unique, modern-day experience, resulting in a work that is as beautiful as it is unflinchingly defiant in the face of discrimination and attack.  

Shunnarah’s debut poetry collection We Had Mansions is simultaneously a love song and a lament: it is a celebration of Shunnarah’s Palestinian heritage, queerness, positive body image, and love. It also explores Shunnarah’s complex struggles with being a queer Palestinian in America, their complicated relationship with religion, and acts as a testament to the continuing hardships faced by Palestinians all over the world. Although We Had Mansions illustrates the hurts Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of displacement and genocide with raw candor, it is not a poetry collection about suffering; it recognizes resilience and honors the love and hope that continues to be ever-present in Palestinian culture.

Shunnarah’s poetry is marked by a confessional voice, drawing on personal experience and emotional vulnerability; the subject matters of their poems are deeply personal to them, and the importance of these topics is evident through the raw, uninhibited, and candid way in which they are described, as if they are confiding in the reader. The poetry collection opens with a couplet: “Sedo told me once our last name means partridge—/that sweet little bird in the pear tree every Christmas” (19). Later in the poem, Shunnarah describes how partridges are land-dwelling birds, and that they were “put in pear trees against their will—branches like an open air prison/the world ignores because at least they can still see the sky” (19). The confessional voice is established through the mention of “Sedo,” an Arabic word which means “grandfather.”. Shunnarah’s grandparents, who moved from Palestine to America, are constants in We Had Mansions. Their recurrence establishes their immense importance in Shunnarah’s childhood as well as their adult life, acting as physical manifestations for Shunnarah’s Palestinian heritage, their connection to their homeland, generational trauma and gender roles, and the preservation of culture. Shunnarah writes that their “grandfather didn’t want to leave the old country,” but felt as if “to escape exile he had to exile himself” (24).  

Although We Had Mansions illustrates the hurts Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of displacement and genocide with raw candor, it is not a poetry collection about suffering; it recognizes resilience and honors the love and hope that continues to be ever-present in Palestinian culture.

By sharing the history of their family, Shunnarah is both creating a space for emotional vulnerability to exist between themself and the reader and offering background information that is vital to understanding the unique relationship they have with their heritage. Shunnarah longs for the land their grandparents fled from, which they did not out of a lack of love for Palestine, but out of hope that America would offer opportunities to themselves and their children. By divulging their grandparents’ story, Shunnarah fosters an emotional relationship with the reader, which in turn allows the reader to better understand Shunnarah’s experience and identity as a Palestinian.  

Their confessional voice also enables them to speak candidly about their relationship with gender, body image, and religion, and in doing so minimizes the space between the poet and the poetry. On the topic of their body, they refer to their stretch marks as “tabby stripes,/a vertical shimmer where skin grew to accommodate more of me,” allowing the reader to be privy to vulnerable and personal details about themself not only as a poet but also as a person (30). Similarly, their relationship with and ideas about religion and the connection it shares with Palestine is the subject matter of multiple poems such as “the great falastini,” “everyone’s favorite palestinian,” and “jesus was trans,” which also touch upon the idea of gender. Shunnarah’s hope for Palestinian voices to be heard and for their humanity to be recognized by the world is achieved through the confessional voice that marks their poetry. 

Shunnarah’s We Had Mansions also includes a variety of forms of poetry, ranging from open, free-verse to more close-structured forms. Their use of ghazals and odes in particular establishes the themes of longing, loss, love, and celebration that are present throughout the collection. The ghazal form is often used to convey melancholy, love, loss, and other similar emotions, which are key themes in poems such as “prayer ghazal,” an expostulation on how Arabs welcomed refugees who then colonized them, and “a falling in love ghazal,” a tender poem about the poet’s love for their beloved, each couplet ending with “habibi”, which translates to “my love.” 

 

Shunnarah writes in the ode form not only to celebrate ideas, but to ignite conversation and to encourage the dismantling and reforming of patriarchal systems in society.  

Odes are also a recurring form in We Had Mansions, which are often used to celebrate a person, place, thing, or concept. In “ode to short nails,” Shunnarah illustrates and celebrates queerness, particularly in AFAB individuals, by using the ode form to amplify the significance of fingers and fingernails in the sapphic scene. This ode celebrates Shunnarah’s identity as a queer individual as well as sapphism on a larger scale; similarly, “ode to cows and clitorises” is a poem about female sexuality that acts as a raw commentary on the lack of research in modern medicine for women. Shunnarah writes in the ode form not only to celebrate ideas, but to ignite conversation and to encourage the dismantling and reforming of patriarchal systems in society.  

We Had Mansions is a collection of poetry that encapsulates not only Shunnarah’s experience as a Palestinian in America, but as a Palestinian who is queer, as a Palestinian who has loved and lost, as a Palestinian who struggles and overcomes again and again—that is to say, as a human. Shunnarah’s confessional voice and their use of a variety of poetic forms creates a bond between poet and reader that ultimately fosters a space of emotional vulnerability, and in doing so causes the already-forthright subject matters of their poems to evolve further in intensity. 

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Interview by Plamena Malinova

Through sharp and propulsive prose, All-Night Pharmacy offers a poignant look at a young woman’s journey toward self-ownership, exploring themes of addiction, coming out, and intergenerational trauma.

The novel opens with a spotlight on two sisters—first-generation immigrants with an inheritance trauma that implicitly drives their toxic bond. Madievsky’s characters grapple with their identities and the weight of family turmoil with a codependency on pills and people. 

The parallel between the physical need to escape political oppression and how the next generation copes, and sometimes crumbles, is observed with much originality and imagination. 

Plamena Malinova (P.M.): What inspired you to write All-Night Pharmacy? What was your journey of crafting characters, plot, etc., and how did that differ from process of writing poetry?

Ruth Madievsky (R.M.): With all my fiction, I try to channel a voice that I would follow anywhere. The first line of the novel, “Spending time with my sister Debbie was like buying acid off a guy you met on the bus,” was one of the first I wrote. I immediately felt like I wanted to get on that bus and see where it goes. For me, the voice generates the plot, not the other way around. The novel actually started out as a linked short story collection, so a lot of the work entailed stitching the stories together and filling in the interstitial spaces between them. Most of those stories made up parts one and two of the novel. I’m actually so pleased that one of the stories was summarily rejected by every literary journal I sent it to, since that story contained the ending of the novel!

In terms of how that dovetails with my poetic craft, I also approach poetry from a place of curiosity and not knowing where each line will take me. The difference is, the voice in my poems is usually a version of my own. But in both genres, the mystery of what I’ll write that day drives me. 

The feelings of living between worlds and of what we owe the dead for their sacrifices are personal obsessions and forces I’m sure I’ll be contending with for a long time.

P.M.: Can you discuss the novel’s organizational structure and the balance between the addiction, coming-out, and ancestral trauma narratives? How did you prioritize each strand? 

R.M.: Maria Kuznetsova asked in an interview in Full Stop, “Were you consciously trying to write one kind of narrative, or to resist writing one kind of narrative? Does that relate to the title, All-Night Pharmacy—almost like, hey, I’m open all night, there’s all kinds of shit in here!” I thought this was an incredible theory. The novel is like an all-night pharmacy where you can find the most disparate things that seemingly have no business being next to each other. But my feeling was that all of these themes are deeply interconnected. Sasha sees her psychic abilities as both an extension of her queerness and a reaction to trauma. The narrator has trouble cutting ties with her toxic sister, partly because they’re descended from survivors of the Holocaust and Soviet Terror, and the thought of voluntarily discarding a family member feels unnatural. I felt strongly that these threads are all related, but not in a pithy way you can distill down to a thesis. 

P.M.: Immigrant narratives are often full of nostalgia, memory, and loss. And while I wouldn’t label All-Night Pharmacy as solely an immigrant narrative, I loved how the novel resisted the trope of characters who are defined by a longing for the ‘motherland.’ Can you elaborate on Debbie and her younger sister’s tendency to live on the edge? What was behind these psychological machines and their codependence?

R.M.: It doesn’t sit well with the narrator or Debbie that their ancestors lived through historic traumas that are unrelatable to them, only for them to be making decisions that those ancestors might find revolting. But on the other hand, what a blessing that the narrator can have erotic experiences with women and not feel oppressed by that desire. That freedom is something that might bring her ancestors joy in the abstract, even if they wouldn’t understand or approve of that particular application of it. The narrator and Debbie live close to the knife partly because of what their ancestors went through, though they wouldn’t think of it that way. I imagine there’s a version of survivor’s guilt there that drives them toward dangerous experiences. 

P.M.: On the flip side, how much of the story was influenced by your family and your work as a clinical pharmacist? Where did you find inspiration to write about ‘bad’ women, when often, first-generation immigrants aren’t given room to misbehave?

R.M.: The feelings of living between worlds and of what we owe the dead for their sacrifices are personal obsessions and forces I’m sure I’ll be contending with for a long time. Some of the family lore, too—like the murdered great-grandfather—come from my family. I wrote about the joys and complications of that in a Catapult essay, “Translating the Immigrant Experience into Fiction,” where I also quoted a bunch of other fiction writers I admire on the topic. I’ve always been interested in “women behaving badly” (one of my favorite genres to read), and my knowledge of esoteric pharmacy laws inspired the expired opiate drug ring in the novel. I knew I wanted to include some scams and hijinks, and it was way easier to write what I know (and haven’t seen written about in fiction before) than to come up with some other ridiculous scheme. 

It doesn’t sit well with the narrator or Debbie that their ancestors lived through historic traumas that are unrelatable to them, only for them to be making decisions that those ancestors might find revolting. But on the other hand, what a blessing that the narrator can have erotic experiences with women and not feel oppressed by that desire.

I think partly because of the pressure on first-generation immigrants—particularly eldest daughters—to uphold family honor, I was especially interested in transgression. It’s fun to raise the stakes and follow a character’s questionable choices to their aftermath.

P.M.: Culturally, many Eastern Europeans resist thinking of themselves in psychological terms. How did you approach writing about these dynamics in your characters? And what do you want readers to take away from the psychology of addiction and recovery? 

R.M.: I hope it’s very clear that I don’t see addiction as a moral failing. Being alive is fucking hard, and the challenges that being an immigrant or descendant of immigrants adds can be sizable. Living between worlds—never feeling fully at home in one discrete place—can be isolating, and the Eastern European skepticism of therapy and other modalities of psychological support doesn’t help. I’ve mostly grown up in the U.S., having immigrated when I was two, but the chokehold that the Eastern European need to avoid pozor (shame) has had on me is significant. I used to write a column at Catapult called “Eldest Immigrant Daughter” all about that. At times, writing the novel, I felt constrained by the need to “represent” post-Soviet culture fairly. I was worried that readers would come away from the book believing it was a thorough portrait of what people from that slice of the world/time are like. But ultimately, you can’t control what people take away from your work, and I choose to believe that most readers will be more astute than to assume that these characters are stand-ins for a culture at large.

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