Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Gabrielle Bellot

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, New Yorker, Guernica, Tin House, and many other places. She is working on a novel and essay collection.

Proof Casts a Shadow

By the Lamplight

By Gabrielle Bellot

Brent, I called him. He was tall, lanky, leanly muscled, skin the brown of a burned gingersnap, hair trimmed, jaw square, yet soft. The day he came up to me, […]