2025 Randall Albers Young Writers Award

The Randall Albers Young Writers Award returns for its third year. On Saturday, May 17, we will present awards to young writers of both prose and poetry and listen as they read aloud from their work. We will be joined by families, friends, teachers, and a host of notable Chicago writers. It is a touching and entertaining way to welcome our new generation of great Chicago writers. Deadline for submissions has been extended until Friday, March 7 at 5 p.m. CST. This year's poetry judge is National Book Award winner Daniel Borzutzky; the prose judge is acclaimed bestselling journalist Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. 

Borzutzky is the author of six full-length poetry collections, including the National Book Award-winning The Performance of Becoming Human (2016), Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (2021), and Lake Michigan (2018). He has also published three poetry chapbooks, two volumes of essays and poetry, and four books of poetry translation.  He is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago’s English and Latin American and Latino Studies departments.

Tan authored A Tiger in the Kitchen (2011) and Sarong Party Girls (2016), edited Singapore Noir (2014), and was the co-creator and co-editor of 
Anonymous Sex (2022). She is the inaugural George R.R. Martin Chair in Storytelling at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications, and is an active member of the Asian American Journalists Association.