Nature Writing Contest 2023 Winners

Please join us in celebrating the following winners of our 28th Annual Nature Writing Contest, each linked to a PDF of his or her winning work for your reading pleasure! We also look forward to celebrating them all in person during a special invitation-only event in July.

This year’s contest attracted a record-breaking 222 entries before Earth Day, and we couldn’t be more excited about the potential for future years. Special thanks to the Foundation for Geauga Parks for helping us provide better cash prizes in 2023! To everyone else who entered but didn’t place, also, thank you, too! Your support keeps the wind under the wings of this contest year after year; we are all winners when we let Nature inspire us to write.

Child Prose

1st – Nathan Thomas, “The Bird who was Afraid of Heights”
2nd – Clara Findel, “The Tree of Choices”
3rd – Abigail Vatty, “The Ice Cold Creek”
Honorable Mention – Daniel Chin, “Bob and Frank”
Honorable Mention – Constantine Diamantis, “The Rabbit Chase”

Child Poetry

1st – Frances Donlan, “I am a tree”
2nd – Maya Leebow, “Once upon a time…”
3rd – Irene Molnar-Williams, “Shorts Weather”
Honorable Mention – Christine Krug, “The cascading water cools my ankles…”
Honorable Mention – Abigail Vatty, “The Path of Purple Flowers”

Adolescent Prose

1st – Grey Hudak, “The Forager”
2nd – Adelaide Oja, “A Single Acorn”
3rd – Oluchi Nnadi, “A Natural Awakening: A Brief Insight on Nature”
Honorable Mention – Molly Moidell, “Calm to Calamity”

Adolescent Poetry

1st – Grace Voudris, “Stream of Consciousness”
2nd – Jiawen Hu, “Fall Leaves”
3rd – Camryn Joyner, “The Greedy Tree”
Honorable Mention – Chiroi Niehus, “Wolf in Winter”

Adult Prose

1st – Suzanne Ondrus, “Life Within”
2nd – Andrew France, “His Incredible Journey”
3rd – Allison Noga, “119 Days”
Honorable Mention – Carol Weitzman, “My Earliest Experiences of Nature”
Honorable Mention – Jason Lea, “Pandemic Snowman”

Adult Poetry

1st – Suzanne Ondrus, “Blackberried Love”
2nd – Chris Paterniti, “An Ode to Fungi”
3rd – Sarah Marcus-Donnelly, “They Were Bears”
Honorable Mention – Manda Mance-Wilkinson, “Resilience”
Honorable Mention – Jessica Miller, “Vernal Anthropocene”

About the Judges

Our judge of Child Prose & Poetry, Dr. Katherine Orr has seen her poems appear in The Kenyon Review, The Texas Review, The Midwest Quarterly Journal of Contemporary Thought and many other literary journals and anthologies. She has led poetry workshops in and around Northeast Ohio for many years, and her most recent research focuses on the uses of poetry and metaphor as healing agents. Presently she teaches Poetry and Creative Writing at Kent State University, and is a longtime friend of the Geauga parks.”

Our judge of Adolescent Prose & Poetry, Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson, is an Indigenous poet, writer, researcher and instructor. You can listen to some of her poetry on Sounds of Change: A Podcast on Poetry and Social Movements during Episode 4, an interview by host Jamie Brian. Her past work with the Wick Poetry Center as a curator for the Big Read National Endowment of the Arts project, focused on Joy Harjo’s An American Dream, was a highlight in her writing life. This September she’ll be teaching a Nature Writing workshop on the Haudensaunee Blessing with the Ohio Poetry Association of which she is a member.

Our judge of Adult Prose & Poetry, Bob Coughlin, is a poet and retired professor of English at Lakeland Community College. Bob is a co-founder and editor of the Chagrin River Review, an online journal. He was born in Willoughby-on-the-Lake, raised in Euclid, and now lives in Hambden Township. He is an avid hiker and fiddle player. Bob and his wife, Linda, have three daughters and seven grandchildren scattered around the country from Montana to Columbus to Mentor. As Garrison Keillor used to say, in this family “all the women are strong and all the children and grandchildren are above average.”