Exposition Review is pleased to announce the next round of winners of Flash 405! We received a vast array of entries, covering every genre from Chelsea’s original call for submissions to “write a story or a memoir or a poem or a word art that feels never-ending.” Her final selections are equally diverse and uniquely compelling.
Congratulations to our 1st and 2nd place winners, who received a cash prize, and our honorable mentions, which are now available to read below.
Judge’s Comments:
“Loops have been on my mind lately–in the personal, in storytelling, and in the larger forces of nature and history. Back in May, I participated in the LA Immersive Invitational with my theatre company and we created a 10-minute piece about a person stuck in a literal time loop where the audience was tasked with how to assist in breaking him out of it. As a social experiment, even in its silly form, it was interesting to see where an audience’s default curiosities fell, where they put their trust, and where they felt they had power.
As patterns in our lives and patterns in stories, when we become aware of loops, they force us to wonder and to search–do we have an opportunity to break out of this, or is this our fate?
When I started reading the submissions for Loop, I wasn’t searching for a singular thing. I was ready to go for the ride. I was ready to find the thing that felt the most sticky, that haunted me, that made me lean in, that made me feel the urgency of searching for an exit ramp.
I’m so grateful for the writers who swirled around their loops in such vulnerable, playful, and thoughtful ways. Reading them all together felt like building a strange kind of map–a way to understand our loops so that we may, in time, find new paths forward.”
– Chelsea Sutton
Congratulations again to our winners!
1st Place:
Coils by Jaime Gill (Fiction)
2nd Place:
97 Miles by Sydney Cimarolli (Nonfiction)
Honorable Mention:
Recursive Thoughts by Adrian Acu (Experimental)
Avijja Is Pali for Doomed Loop by Elizabeth J. Coleman (Poetry)
The Summer I Drove a Teal Chevy Beretta by Katie Darby Mullins (Nonfiction)
Want to read more? Check out our past Flash 405 contests and winners, and our final contest of 2026 is currently being judged with winners to be announced in October.
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Photo by Aliaksei Lepik