Thanks to our guest judge:

Literary Agent Quressa Robinson

WOW was honored to have guest judge literary agent Quressa Robinson choose this season’s top winners. Thank you, Quressa, for sharing your time and efforts to make these contestants’ dreams come true!

Quressa’s bio:

Quressa Robinson joined Folio Literary Management in 2022 after working at previous agencies, including the Nelson Literary Agency, and as an editor for five years. She is originally from San Francisco, but has been living in New York City for over a decade. As a New York based agent, she is eager to build her MG, YA, and Adult lists. When not curled on her couch reading, she plays video games, enjoys too much, TV—mostly Sailor Moon and Avatar: The Last Airbender (Fire Nation)—eats delicious things, drinks champagne, hangs out with her very clever partner, and adds another “dramatic” color to her lipstick collection. Quressa is also a member of the 2017-2019 WNDB Walter Grant Committee and holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Columbia University. In 2020, she was named a Publisher's Weekly Star Watch finalist. In 2021 she was named an influential gatekeeper in Book and Film Globe’s inaugural Publishing Power 30 list alongside phenoms like Reece Witherspoon, Celeste Ng, and Lisa Lucas.

X/Twitter: @qnrisawesome

Folio Literary Agency: https://www.foliojr.com/quressa-robinson

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We want to thank each and every one of you for sharing your wonderful stories with our guest judges this season. We know it takes a lot to hit the send button! While we’d love to give every contestant a prize, just for your writing efforts, that wouldn’t be much of a competition. One of the hardest things we do after a contest ends is to confirm that someone didn’t place in the winners’ circle. But, believe it when we say that every one of you is a true winner for participating.

To recap our current process, we have a roundtable of 12+ judges who blindly score equally formatted submissions based on: Subject, Content, and Technical. That’s the first step of the process. If a contestant scores well on the first round, they receive an e-mail notification that she passed the initial judging phase. The second round judging averages out scores and narrows down the top entries, and our guest judge helps to determine the First, Second, and Third Place Winners, followed by the Runners Up.

As with any contest, judging so many talented writers is not a simple process. With blind judging, all contestants start from the same point, no matter the skill level, experience, or writing credentials. It’s the writer’s story and voice that shines through, along with the originality, powerful and clear writing, and the writer’s heart.

We’ve enjoyed reading your stories, each and every one of them. Thank you for sharing your work with us. We hope that you continue writing and submitting so we can watch you grow as writers and storytellers, because each season is a rebirth of opportunity.

Râna’s Bio:

 

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Werewolf Syndrome

By Râna Campbell

 

As the summer solstice sun begins melting into the horizon, Ulrike hits the gas pedal and screeches out of Glendale along the I-5 to East Hollywood, where she parks in front of a Walgreens boasting a “now with extended hours” sign. With trembling...paws, she adjusts the rearview mirror to check her reflection. Hair—coarse and conspicuous—has started sprouting from her forehead, too. She’d waxed every inch of her face, limbs, and torso right before her date, expecting the hypertrichosis to hold off a while. But her body sabotaged the evening; Ulrike can still hear Jake’s “get lost, freak!” and feel the thud of shoes thrown at her head.

What did she do to deserve this life, eat her twin in utero?

Well, we’re back in Freakywood now, she thinks, exiting the car and crossing the parking lot. Loudspeakers at the entrance greet her with the title song from Hair. “Oh, fuck off,” she mumbles, bombing into the pharmacy.

An airborne shelving unit barely misses her as she passes through the automatic door, and a rain of shaving products lands at her feet. Looking up, Ulrike locks eyes with a rampaging humanoid beast, who pauses and examines her with something like familiarity. Customers and employees stampede to the back door screaming as the creature’s last visible patches of skin mutate, completing its charcoal-grey coat. Ulrike glances at the shadow descending along the wall behind it.

You gotta be kidding me...

She’s heard the rumors about the so-called Tinseltown Terror. But she figured it was the usual tabloid bullshit, spawned in coked-up circles of plastic people living reality-TV lives tucked away in the hills—the kinds of people so laser-mown and surgically enhanced they’d mistake a bearded man for Bigfoot.

...A werewolf!

Ulrike remains frozen, captivated by this magnificent manimal.

“Come here,” she manages to utter, slowly extending her hand. The werewolf approaches, snarling, step by cautious step. “You can tell me your name after sunrise,” Ulrike says softly.

The werewolf whimpers and sits on its haunches, placing a paw in Ulrike’s hand; with the other, it strokes her hirsute cheek. The banshee wail of nearing sirens breaks their tender trance, and together the two dash out into the smoggy, starless night. As they cut across the parking lot, Ulrike motions for the werewolf to follow her to her car. She barely has time to help it into the backseat before the flash flood of red and blue lights. Under cover of the moment’s only remaining sliver of darkness, she jumps in right after it and quietly pulls the door shut, just missing the small militia of police officers who run past and storm the store’s entrance, prepared to open fire.

“Get down,” she says, ducking. The werewolf grunts, struggling to make itself small.

“Here.” Ulrike lowers herself horizontally to the floor and directs the werewolf to sprawl across the seating. As they settle into their positions, Ulrike looks, once again, into the beast’s smoldering yellow eyes. In them, she sees her reflection, her face dripping with long, thick hair. She lays a gentle hand on her companion’s ribcage and smiles, and she can swear she senses it smiling too as its pupils narrow and a gob of saliva escapes from the corner of its mouth. She realizes she might not make it out of this car alive, or may even find herself howling at the next full moon. But as she remembers Jake and the shoes, the impossible billboard ads, the bullies, the beatings, her mother’s contempt, her doctor’s dismissal, and every beautician’s begrudging snickers...she also realizes it’s a chance she’s damn well ready to take.

 

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What Râna Won:

• $400.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Zarah’s Bio:

Zarah is a single parent living in Liverpool, United Kingdom, with her son, Kellen. Zarah holds a marketing degree from the University of Liverpool and previously worked as a paralegal in contract law. Zarah is independently learning creative writing and in 2021, Zarah was shortlisted in the Penguin Michael Joseph Christmas Romance competition, following which she organised with other shortlistees to write and publish two Christmas Romance anthologies, with a third planned for 2025. Zarah writes broadly across the Fiction genre with a preference for sci-fi, fantasy, dystopian and speculative fiction.

In 2024, Zarah was a candidate awarded the Writers on the Rise program with the Black British Book Festival and Pan Macmillan, and was shortlisted in the Jericho Writers Self-Edit Your Novel course, as well as being named a Top 10 Finalist in the WOW Summer 2024 Flash Fiction contest and being shortlisted for the Tadpole Press December micro contest and the Globe Soup December micro contest. Zarah hosts a weekly online writing group for underrepresented writers, and is currently focusing on two novels for submission in Summer 2025. In her spare time, Zarah crochets, bakes, and does DIY (badly).

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The Salt Line

By Zarah Elouis-Ro

 

I heard my mother ask our neighbour for salt.

I stared at the glass grinder on the table. The rocky crystals sparkled within and drew a question mark to my lips. The grinder was full to the hilt, partnered with the dark cloves in the pepper grinder next to it. Black and white, unlike the world which housed them. 

When she sat me at the table, mother – with her wide wild eyes, and nervous smile – promised to be back in a moment, squeezing my arms lightly, three measured times. She didn’t close the front door though, which she always said was bad luck. I fought the urge to close it – she would never know, surely? – but I had my orders to stay sat.

Still ...

Outside called me, with its powder blue sky and smiling sun. There was no whisper of wind, but I heard fairies and sprites calling me out – saw them flash by out the corner of my eyes as I purposely looked away. My tights itched up and down my legs, urging me to leap off the wooden chair. I shuffled, wishing I didn’t have to wear them. But mother liked the neat rows of woven threads, and I was a doll just as much as the porcelain ones that lined my room, their glassy eyes staring out in perfect unison from the same height. 

Everything was measured in lines back then.

It was the only way to ensure protection against the things only mother could see. An unbroken line allowed things in, she would say, spending hours lining everything up as neatly as possible. I developed a fear-based respect for these lines. Learned to not go careening through them while playing or jumble them up in curiosity. It would take her hours, sometimes days, of incessant focus to rectify such tragedies.

There was no shouting, no violence, just sadness. Heartbreak. Stress that drew her face so tight I feared she would never smile again. How could she keep us both safe if the lines were broken? Couldn’t I see how carefully she maintained them? Her disappointment crushed me. I didn’t want to make things worse for her, so if our house was the only place she could keep us safe, then I would become its guardian too. Lines were our shield against the chaotic world. Everything within them was controlled and ordered. If we honoured them like others honoured Gods, then we’d be okay.

Which is why the salt was such an odd request.

The salt was filled exactly to the ‘max’, marked inside by a thin unbroken circle of white stamped within. Same with the pepper. The two grinders stood in formation like palace guards, along with the two golden candlesticks, whose tapered (unused) candles reached the same height. Their wicks – pointed to the ceiling – had been trimmed to the exact matching millimetre. At either end of these stationed guards were two cylindrical vases, with flowers – plastic and silk, never real – all stood to attention. What a cavalry we made, keeping mother’s order even in her absence.

We listened to mother’s frantic knock on the neighbour’s door with bated breath. I knew she would be toe-to-toe with the stone porch outside their front door, because breaching that line would be discourteous to the neighbour. Would make them vulnerable to the bad things.

The latch and chain scraped across, and before the door was even open –

“Aimee! Can I borrow some salt, please?” Mother’s words trembled like the aftershocks of an earthquake.

“My god, Caroline. Are you okay?” I pictured Aimee’s face. Kind, plump, covered in wrinkles, frown lines added at the sight of mother, who usually kept to herself. “What’s happened, love? Come in, come in.”

When mother breached the porch-line and accepted Aimee’s invitation, I released the breath I was holding captive. The room felt lighter. Why was that? I couldn’t have said. But the door was still open, and when outside called me again I obliged it with a leap off my chair.

Sometime in adulthood I solved the mystery of mother asking Aimee for salt. She wasn’t asking for salt, not really. She was asking to be seen in a way she usually hid from the outside world for fear of what would come next. She was seeking permission to step out of our closed world within the bounds, and into a new one of chaotic freedom.

She asked our neighbour for salt, because she couldn’t ask for a lifeline. 

 

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What Zarah Won:

• $300.00 Cash Prize
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• Publication of winning story on WOW-WomenOnWriting.com website
• Interview on WOW!’s blog The Muffin

Sudha’s Bio:

RUNNERS UP: