Creative Non-Fiction Contest 2025: The Winners

It’s time! Here are the winners of the 2025 Creative Non-Fiction Contest, as chosen by our fantastic judge, Amy Lin. Congratulations to these writers on their big success for their works!

FIRST PLACE: This Essay is a Hug Machine, by Sadie McCarney

Sadie McCarney (she/they)’s second poetry collection, Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking, won the PEI Book Award for Poetry. Other poetry of Sadie’s has appeared in places including Best Canadian Poetry, The Walrus, Room, The Malahat Review, Grain, and The Fiddlehead, with essays in Lunch Ticket and Geist. Sadie lives in Cornwall, PEI with assorted family members and two sweet cats.

A lucid excavation of inheritance and identity, shot through with the ache for a father shaped by the same invisible wiring, This Essay is a Hug Machine offers a striking precision of heart. Here, Cleopatra 2525, Temple Grandin, the IKEA catalogue, and clowning class become feints across the great divide, turning memory into a clarion current that carries us toward a closing note as perfectly tender as it is singular. — Judge Amy Lin

SECOND PLACE: The Discovery, by Clea Roberts

Clea Roberts lives on the outskirts of Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada with her husband and two children. Her poetry has been translated and published internationally and has been nominated for the League of Canadian Poets Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Award and a National Magazine Award. She has received fellowships from the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, Vermont Studio Centre and is a recipient of the Yukon Advanced Artist Award. Clea teaches at The Writers Studio at Simon Fraser University and facilitates grief writing workshops through Hospice Yukon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her historical novel set during the Klondike gold rush is represented by Jackie Kaiser at Westwood Creative Artists and she is currently working on a book of essays about grief, family and becoming.

A meditation on loneliness, refuge, and chosen kinship, The Discovery traces a child’s private orbits through a volatile home and into the generosity of a neighbour’s care. With tenderness, the essay reframes escape as attention, revealing how small kindnesses become constellations that guide us toward wonder as refuge and survival. — Judge Amy Lin

THIRD PLACE: Timekeeping, by Minerva Laveaga Luna

Minerva Laveaga Luna is a storyteller, editor, and translator. She is the recipient of the 2026 PEN American Bare/Life Review Grant. Her work is anthologized in “Con la urgencia del instante” (2023, Ars Cumminis) and“Borderlines” (2015, Voices Breaking Boundaries). Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Rio Grande Review, and Southwestern American Literature. She is an alum of Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and Macondo Writers residential workshops. Formerly the Director and subsequent Board President of the literary nonprofit organization BorderSenses, she co-founded the literary press Veliz Books. Minerva earned a B.A. in Philosophy and an MFA from UTEP. She is an English Professor at El Paso Community College.

Intimate and thoughtful, Timekeeping considers what it means to lose years to medical dismissal and cultural silence around menopause. With care, the essay traces time misspent and reclaimed, arriving at a perfectly wry and soft landing place that reframes slowness as agency and well-wrought grace. — Judge Amy Lin

You’ll be able to read Sadie McCarney’s first-place piece in an upcoming issue of Room. A final congratulations to all three winners!

As always, a big thank you to every writer who trusted our collective, and our judge with their writing. Whether it is 500 words or 2,000, submitting your writing anywhere at all takes courage, and we are so grateful for all those who chose Room to make that leap.

Last but not least, a thank you to our wonderful judge, Amy Lin, for the time and care put into selecting a shortlist and three winners! We couldn’t have run this contest without your thoughtful comments, patience, and careful consideration.

Room‘s annual Creative Non-Fiction Contest will open again in 2026.

Tags: 2025 Creative Non-Fiction Contest | creative non-fiction contest