Editor’s Note:
Dear Reader,
Who looks back at us from within the glass of the mirror? What strange doublings exist in the world around us? What can we learn from witnessing what is twinned? From Dostoevsky to Baudelaire, writers have long considered the provocative perspective of inhabiting, observing, or simply existing in the presence of a double/twin. The theme of this issue extends this tradition and tackles it anew, exploring the uncanny possibilities of a double or twin.
The cover art featured on this issue, titled “Man (The Mirror Within),” is one example of a work that illuminates these possibilities. This image by photographer Najib Joe Hakim reflects the many doubled faces of an individual in contemplation. The faces that echo forward and back are turned at different angles, each with their own particular expression. Are the faces records of past selves that exist alongside the present and future? Or perhaps with each passing moment, the self is constantly being reinvented and transformed.
In one short story, a boy finds his soulmate in a talking pony. In another, an intoxicated Halloween partier meditates on how land ecosystems repeat and double throughout time. Mirroring these themes, the ruptures of the physical body are scrutinized in one of our nonfiction pieces, alongside poetry that dwells on new ways of looking and listening at the world, houses that are both familiar and unfamiliar, and beings with wings. In this issue, we also celebrate the winners and runners-up of our most recent Witness Literary Awards, which were judged by Isle McElroy in fiction, Mary-Kim Arnold in nonfiction, and Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez in poetry.
We hope that you—our dear reader, our double—find as much delight in these pages as we had in putting this issue together. Enjoy!
– The Editors
2026 Literary Awards
Fiction
Winner: Andie Weber, Deep Blue
Runner-up: Helen Han Wei Luo, The Pilgrimage
Poetry
Winner: P. Q. R. Anderson, Cormorants
Runner-up: Sumaat Khan, Fledgling
Nonfiction
Winner: Emily Uecker, Climbing a Rope, or How a Tsunami is Like an Ear
Runner-up: Lizbeth Bárcena, Inexpressible Things of the Desert
Double/Twin
Fiction
Luke Buffini, Recollections of My Equine Soul
Arthur Mandal, Hour Glass
Peter Kessler, It
Emma Dollar, The Night Shift
Julie Teixeira, Women’s Work
John Patrick McShea, At the End of the Prairie
Poetry
G. C. Waldrep, For the New Forms of Listening
Hannah Ensor & Laura Wetherington, we like to see the clouds being fast
Mingyu Lin, Harbor of Hong Kong/San Francisco
Drew Rollins, Mirror Study
Arah Ko, Anamnesis
Amanda Moore, Las Dos Amandas
S. A. Leger, The truth according to the woman
Abby E. Murray, Kites
Nonfiction
J. R. Fenn, Remnant
Kimberly Grey, Paterson (excerpt)
Anu Khosla, Fault Lines
D. López, Dictionary of False Friends
Mireya Looby, The Dog
Rebecca Bernard, Creatures
Cover Art: “Man (The Mirror Within)” by Najib Joe Hakim
