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

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Jamie Lyn Smith

Jamie Lyn Smith is a writer, editor, and teacher. She earned her BA in English and Theater from Kenyon College, her MA in Education from Fordham University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University. Smith reads fiction for The Kenyon Review and is a founding member of BreakBread Literacy Project, former fiction editor at BreakBread Magazine, and the founding editor of Bridge. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, Yemassee Journal, Bayou Magazine, Ploughshares, and other fine literary maga-zines. Her debut short story collection, Township, was published by Cornerstone Press in January 2022. She is currently writing Lifeguards, a novel about millennial crises and the rise of white nationalism in the rural Midwest, for which she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Smith lives in Ohio, but New York will always be home.

Fiction

July/Aug 2015

Nature Preserve

By Jamie Lyn Smith

There were three spots on the parks commission in the township election, and no one ran for the third, so it could be said that Cecil and Ross each won […]