MĀNOA

We are excited to announce the winners of the 2025 Mānoa Journal Writing Contest in Fiction and Poetry. This year, the finalists were judged by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto and Mai Der Vang. We would like to extend our deepest thanks to the judges for their care and insight, and to all the finalists for their wonderful work. 

Fiction judge, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, selected Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk’s “The Good Girl’s Guide to Boy Crazy” as the first-prize winner. “The confident direct address in Tokuno-Lynk’s ‘The Good Girl’s Guide to Boy Crazy’ seized me from its first line,” writes Kakimoto, “reading as much as a bidding as it does an invitation into a captivating narrative. The gorgeous specificity of images and unexpected details work in tandem with this brilliant voice to paint an indelible portrait of girlhood.”

Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk is a writer and nonprofit fundraiser, and the great-grandchild of Japanese farmers and laborers in Hawai‘i and the Bay Area. She grew up in Kāneʻohe, Hawai’i and now lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her spouse and two children. Her stories have appeared in Joyland, Litro Magazine, and The Iowa Review.

No runner-up was selected for fiction this year. 

For poetry, judge Mai Der Vang selected Erica Hom’s “The Chinese word for endurance is the word ‘knife’ atop the word ‘heart’” as the first-prize winner. Vang writes of the piece, “Potent and unafraid in its offering of oral history, familial loss, and personal truth, this poem vividly bites back with a ‘sharpness folded inward’ that pays homage to matriarchal wisdom. The speaker’s direct address compels the poem forward as each line moves with ease and intensity. What a powerful anthem and poem to live by!”

Erica Hom is a Filipina-diaspora poet, artist and educator. Her writing has been featured in various online magazines, art installations, and print publications including West Trade Review, Room Magazine, The Arkansas International, Honey Literary, Sidewalk Poetry, Voices from the Attic ,and the Midway Journal. Her work was awarded the CD Wright’s Emerging Poets Prize and was twice nominated for Best of the Net. 

Vang also named Vinita Agrawal’s “Threshold Song” as the runner-up in poetry. “Wrought with gorgeous language and emotional heft, this poem beautifully traverses the logistics of loss and duties involved with managing grief,” writes Vang. “Framing the poem are details of birds and animals that not only enrich the poem’s meaning but also draw upon the mysteries and guardians of the natural world to aid in the process of crossing over.”

Vinita Agrawal has authored six books of poetry. Books edited by her include two anthologies on climate change, The Centennial Volume on Nissim Ezekiel – Poet & Father and one on the Kashmiri Poet Ghulam Rasool Nazki. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024, the Proverse Prize Hongkong 2021, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. Her book Eartha has been long listed for the Sarojini Naidu Award for Poetry 2025. She won a special mention in the Hawkers Prize 2019. Her work was shortlisted for the inaugural Dipankar Khiwani Memorial prize 2021. She co-edits the Yearbook series of Indian Poetry in English. She was former Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She was one of the twenty poets to be featured in a documentary on Asian poets titled Deepest Uprising made in Taiwan. She is a birder and a photographer. www.vinitawords.com

Congratulations to the winners! And thank you once again to everyone who made this contest a success.

---

Fiction Winner

First Prize “The Good Girl’s Guide to Boy Crazy” by Chelsea Tokuno-Lynk.

Fiction Finalists

Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera
In Kyu Chung
Lux Kickapoo-Johnson
Zoë Malia Ozoa Loos
Jaime Gill
Trelaine Ito
M. Anne Kala‘i
Dalton Sikes

Poetry Winners

First Prize “The Chinese word for endurance is the word ‘knife’ atop the word ‘heart’” by Erica Hom.

Runner-Up “Threshold Song” by Vinita Agrawal.

Poetry Finalists

Laurence Li
Ysabella Perez
Lifei Cheng
Ellie Trahern
Annabelle Praznik
Letitia Chan
Alice Liang
Nina Peláez
Jo Cipriano
Kalehua Kim
Tom Nutting
Stefan Balan
Vasvi Kejriwal
Annelise Freeze
Jonathon Medeiros

---

Our Judges

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto

Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is the Japanese and Kanaka Maoli author of the story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare (Bloomsbury 2023), a USA Today national bestseller. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Joyland, and elsewhere. Named a Fall 2023 “Writer to Watch” by Publisher’s Weekly, she has received the “Author Under 35” Award by the HONOLULU Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature. Her work has been supported by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tin House Winter Workshop. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and is an Affiliate Faculty in Fiction at Antioch University Los Angeles and a Lecturer in English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. A Fiction Editor for No Tokens journal, she lives in Honolulu.

Mai Der Vang

Mai Der Vang is the author of Primordial (Graywolf Press, 2025), Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an American Book Award, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets, among others. The recipient of a Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowship, she teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State and currently serves as the Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.