Bethesda Magazine and the Bethesda Urban Partnership sponsored the 2025 Short Story & Essay Contest for local writers. The judges pored over 145 short stories and 227 essays to select the winners, who were recognized at a ceremony at The Bethesdan Hotel in Bethesda in March. First-, second- and third-place writers in the contest and honorable mentions were awarded cash prizes ranging from $50 to $500. Read the full stories and essays by the winners and runners-up below.
Adult Short Story Contest
First Place: Asma Dilawari, Bethesda
Second place: Laura Kuhlmann, Rockville
Third place: John Simpson, Germantown
Honorable mention: Olivia Ikenberry, Silver Spring
High School Short Story Contest
First place: Max Bakelar, Georgetown Preparatory School
Second place: Hana Sor, Montgomery Blair High School
Third place: Asha Akkinepally, Richard Montgomery High School
Honorable mention: Lila Grosko, Montgomery Blair High School
Adult Essay Contest
First place: Sarah Craven, Cabin John
Second place: Kathy Wei, Bethesda
Third place: Lisa Park, Fairfax, Virginia
Honorable mention: Kyi May Kaung, Chevy Chase
Honorable mention: Celina Santana, Bethesda
Honorable mention: Lindsey Wray, Arlington, Virginia
High School Essay Contest
First place: Logan Moran, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School
Second place: Caroline Easley, Walt Whitman High School
Third place: Michaela Levy, Winston Churchill High School
Honorable mention: Marin Brow, The Potomac School
Honorable mention: Eleham Salo, Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School
Honorable mention: Katja Treadwell, Walt Whitman High School
Short Story & Essay Contest Judges
Short Story Judging Coordinator and Adult Short Story Judge
Lisa Friedman is an essayist, author and educator whose work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Smithsonian magazine and The Huffington Post. She holds a master’s degree in fiction from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in American literature from George Washington University. Friedman also teaches creative writing and mentors professional and beginning writers in the art of fiction. Her novel Hello Wife is set to be released Sept. 30 via Santa Fe Writers Project. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Adult Short Story Judges
Christine Bollow is the co-owner and programs director for Loyalty Bookstores. A resident of Silver Spring, she was a fiction juror for the 2024 Kirkus Prize, has won the Duende-Word BIPOC Bookseller Leadership Award and has been a Publishers Weekly Star Watch honoree. Bollow is the founder of Liwanag Filipino Lit Fest DC and is a book consultant for multiple comic cons. A graduate of Barnard College, she is passionate about championing books by marginalized authors both at Loyalty and on Instagram @readingismagical.
Jarvis Slacks has taught composition and fiction writing at Montgomery College for 17 years. He has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His discipline is in fiction writing, and he is currently working on his first novel. He lives in Washington, D.C.
High School Short Story Judges
Eva Langston is a former high school math teacher who is now an instructor at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. She is co-host of the podcast “This Mama Is Lit!” and will soon launch her own podcast, “The Long Road to Publishing.” Langston works as a writing coach, and her writing resources newsletter on Substack has more than 5,000 followers. Langston received her master of fine arts degree in fiction writing from the University of New Orleans and is represented by Ali Lake of O’Connor Literary. Langston lives in Washington Grove.
Debbie Levy is the author of more than 30 books for young people, including The New York Times bestselling I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark; A Dangerous Idea: The Scopes Trial, the Original Fight Over Science in Schools and more. Levy has been the recipient of a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Honor, the Sydney Taylor Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award, among other honors. Before she started writing books for young people, she worked as a newspaper editor and a lawyer. She lives in Washington, D.C.
John Wang was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and grew up in Los Angeles. He is a professor of English at Montgomery College. He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught English to kindergarten, elementary and junior high students in Matsusaka, Japan. He earned a master’s degree in English/creative writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and a doctorate in English literature/creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Wang’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Cimmaron Review, Quarterly West, Hobart, The Barcelona Review and elsewhere. He lives in Darnestown.
Essay Contest Judges
Jillian Danback-McGhan is a Navy veteran and the author of the debut short story collection Midwatch (Split/Lip Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Military Experience & the Arts, storySouth, Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2023), the anthology Our Best War Stories (Middle West Press, 2020) and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2020 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Award, and her work has been supported by the Fine Arts Work Center, Community Building Art Works and Missouri Humanities. Danback-McGhan lives in Annapolis with her family.
Anna Lapera is a Guatemalan-Filipina-American author and educator. Her debut novel, Mani Semilla Finds Her Quetzal Voice, is an International Latino Book Awards winner, a Jane Addams Peace Association finalist, a 2025 selection for the American Library Association’s Feminist Book Project, and is on the School Library Journal’s 2024 list of Best Middle Grade Books and is on the New York Public Library’s 2024 list of Best Books for Kids. Most weekends you can find her hiking in Silver Spring, where she lives with her husband, two daughters and a rescue dog named Leo. She is currently working on a young adult historical fiction novel set in 1970s Guatemala.
Vonetta Young is a writer and strategy consultant based in Washington, D.C. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Indiana Review, Barrelhouse, Lunch Ticket, Catapult and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others. She serves as executive editor and insight (nonfiction) editor at The Offing. Follow her on Instagram @vonettawrites.
Contest Information
Bethesda Magazine and the Bethesda Urban Partnership work together to honor local writers through the short story and essay contests. Short stories are limited to 2,500 words, and authors must be residents of Montgomery County or Upper Northwest D.C. (20015 and 20016 ZIP codes). Essays are limited to 500 words and writers in the adult contest must live in Washington, D.C., or select counties of Maryland (Montgomery, Prince George’s, Howard and Frederick) or Virginia (Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William); high school writers must be residents of, or attend a school in, Montgomery County or Washington, D.C.
Keep an eye out for next year’s contest details at bethesdamagazine.com/forms/essay-and-short-story-contest/.
This appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
