Award-winning author and Subnivean judge Megan Mayhew Bergman

Subnivean, SUNY Oswego’s student-run international literary magazine, has new contest judges for 2026 and a new editor in dhief. All three are nationally acclaimed writers who will help Subnivean continue to champion the work of exciting and diverse poets and writers.

The seventh annual Subnivean Awards, open to writers across the country (and beyond) will be judged by Pushcart and National Endowment for the Arts-prize winning poet Chen Chen, and by award-winning author Megan Mayhew Bergman, whose work has been hailed by the New York Times and New Yorker. 

Chen is the author of two books of poetry, “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency” (2022) and “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities “(2017), both published by BOA Editions. His latest chapbook is “Explodingly Yours” (Ghost City Press, 2023). 

His honors include two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists. He lives in Rochester and teaches for the low-residency master of fine arts programs at New England College, Stonecoast and Antioch.

Mayhew-Bergman is the author of three books, “Birds of a Lesser Paradise,” “Almost Famous Women” and “How Strange a Season.” “How Strange a Season” was featured as a New York Times Editor’s Choice and in the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022 list, and longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize, The Story Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. 

A recipient of the Garrett Award for Fiction and the Phil Reed Environmental Writing Award for Journalism, she has written columns on climate change and the natural world for The Guardian and The Paris Review. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, and elsewhere. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2011 and 2015, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She serves as director of Middlebury College’s creative writing program and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. 

The 2026 awards will be coordinated by Albert Abonado, Subnivean’s new editor in chief who also serves as mentor for the Oswego students who work on the journal. Abonado is the author of two volumes of poetry, “Jaw” and “A Field Guide for Accidents,” a National Poetry Series selection published in 2024. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and his poetry has been published in numerous literary magazines. 

Abonado first came to Oswego as an Artist in Residence in fall 2024. He will continue teaching poetry courses at Oswego while also leading digital literary publishing and digital storytelling classes, where students gain hands-on publishing experience working on Subnivean.

With a 2026 deadline of March 15, the Subnivean Awards are an international contest seeking the best poetry and fiction by new and established writers. The editorial team at SUNY Oswego will select five finalists in each category, whose work will be forwarded on to the final judges in poetry and fiction and published in the May issue of the magazine. Two winners (one in poetry, one in fiction) will receive the above, a blurb by the appropriate final judge, and an honorarium.

Subnivean was founded by English and creative writing professor Soma Mei Sheng Frazier in 2020, with Mei Sheng Frazier serving as editor and student mentor from 2020 to 2025. In 2021, Subnivean was a finalist for the Magazine/Best Debut category of the CLMP Firecracker Awards. CLMP is the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, a global nonprofit in support of hundreds of literary publishers. 

Since then, Subnivean has gone on to receive manuscripts submitted by writers working in 58 countries and 49 U.S. states, plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, with a similarly wide readership. 

To learn more about the magazine or international literary competition, visit Subnivean online.

— Submitted by the English and Creative Writing Department