“Morning Coffee,” my latest essay, has been nominated by Ponder Review for a Pushcart Prize

My latest essay (and likely the final one to be published in 2025) has now made it into print, as “Morning Coffee” has now been published in Volume 9, Issue 2 of Ponder Review. Ponder Review is the student-run literary journal of the MFA program at Mississippi University for Women in Columbus, Mississippi and publishes fiction, flash fiction, nonfiction, poetry, short plays, new media, and visual art twice a year.

I am also deeply honored that Ponder Review has nominated “Morning Coffee” for a Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize has been awarded for 50 years and honors the best poetry, short fiction, and essays published each year in small presses. Nominations can only be made by editors of literary magazines and small presses of up to six works they’ve published in the prior calendar year. Winners and a small selection of nominated works are also reprinted annually in the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses anthology.

The nomination is especially touching because of the piece that was selected. “Morning Coffee” is a love letter to my wife about her heroic support through my battles with depression last year. It’s the first essay I’ve written about her, and I began it at my one-week residency last spring at Craigardan in Elizabethtown, New York. The essay also begins and ends by describing my experiences at Craigardan honing my craft with Kate Moses.

Although thousands of essays and poems are nominated each year for the Pushcart Prize—and the higher honor (for both the author and the nominating magazine) is for those who actually win the Pushcart Prize or are selected for republication in Best of the Small Presses—this nomination is still one of the highest honors I’ve yet received for my creative writing. It’s flattering enough to have a literary magazine like your work enough to select it for inclusion in its pages, but to have a piece recognized as one of the six best they’ve published in a given year is touching beyond words. I never had bigger goosebumps than those I felt when learning of my nomination from Ponder Review earlier this month.

A Moment of Reflection

I’ve had a very fortunate and gratifying year. Since I first began writing essays this spring, I’ve had eleven of them published in nine different literary journals and websites, including Ponder Review, Four Tulips, Thorn & Bloom, Bacopa Literary Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Wilderness House Literary Review, Life in Limbo, The Florida Review, and FloridaHikes.com.  “Morning Coffee” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and two other essays received awards in writing contests. My first book, Finding My Way Home: Fighting Depression Backpacking in Central Florida, won the Bronze Prize for Autobiography/Memoir at the FAPA President’s Book Awards and was a Finalist for Nonfiction: Mind/Body/Spirit at the IAN Book of the Year Awards. I also had travel (journalism) articles on backpacking published in Outdoors Unlimited, Go World Travel, and The Footpath Newsletter.

I’m also already looking forward to an exciting 2026, as four new essays are already slated for publication next spring and summer. These include “Mardi Gras ’95,” which won the First Prize for Nonfiction in the SLO NightWriters Golden Quill Contest this past August, as well as forthcoming essays in Big Sky Journal, Under the Gum Tree, and Black Sheep: Unique Tales of Terror and Wonder. I’m also working on my next book, and I can’t wait to write as many new essays as the muses see fit to inspire. It all began for me with an inspirational email I received twenty months ago from Diana Helmuth, and I’ve been helped and taught along the way by many other wonderful authors or muses, including Kate Moses, Sandra Friend, and the editors of the publications listed above, and of course my wife and daughter.

Thank you, Ponder Review, Diana, Sandra, Kara, Claire, and to all the friends who’ve read my book and essays and supported me in this wonderful odyssey of creative writing!