Nature Writing Contest 2026 Winners

Please join us in celebrating the following winners of our 31st Annual Nature Writing Contest! Links to all winning works are also posted below for your reading pleasure, and in addition to publishing their names in the summer Park Explorer Activity Guide, we look forward to celebrating them all in person during a special invitation-only event this July.

This year’s contest attracted an all-time-runner-up 292 entries before Earth Day! Special thanks to the Foundation for Geauga Parks for again helping us provide better cash prizes in 2026. 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

1^st – Elizabeth Wang, “An Early Morning”
2^nd – Arjun Agarwal, “Oh No! What Happened to Nature?”
3^rd – Caleb Duncan, “Holding Aspen”
Honorable Mention – Willow Haney, “Rainyday Butterflies”
Honorable Mention – Abigail Grace Schaner, “Lake Erie Surprise”

Child Poetry

1^st – Rauhish Khasnis, “Geauga Lake”
2^nd – Avery Lasky, “Storm”
3^rd – Walter Ward, “In the Spring”
Honorable Mention – Olivia Zupancic, “Summer”
Honorable Mention – Clara Gloer, “A Field of Flowers”

Adolescent Prose

1^st – Chiroi Niehus, “For Whom the Wing Sings”
2^nd – Kit Weinmann, “The Light of a Firefly”
3^rd – Tzurielle Parrino, “The Botanist”
Honorable Mention – Enoch Lin, “The Great Melting”
Honorable Mention – Haadi Nouman, “A Path He Never Chose”

Adolescent Poetry

1^st – Amelia Windson, “Red-winged Blackbird”
2^nd – Saoirse Niehus, “The Question Song”
3^rd – Chiroi Niehus, “Kingfisher”
Honorable Mention – Geneva Hippensteele, “Belong”
Honorable Mention – Harlow Zaller, “What will spring bring”

Adult Prose

1^st – Brenda Sawyer, “On Gardens, Beartown Lakes, and Being Human”
2^nd – Jennifer Niemann, “Reminders from a Hummingbird”
3^rd – Alyssa Martin, “A Mother’s Nature”
Honorable Mention – Cherie Pepe, “An October Night”

Adult Poetry

1^st – Don Iannone, “A Still Point of Blue”
2^nd – Courtney Cikach, “Decomposition”
3^rd – Dorie Schleiden, “Before Spring”
Honorable Mention – Peggy McCray, “Waterlilies”

About the Judges

Our judge of Child 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.”

Our judge of Adolescent Prose & Poetry, Dr. Katherine Orr teaches poetry and creative writing at Kent State University and is a longtime friend of the Geauga parks.

Our judge of Adult Prose & Poetry, Kimberlee Medicine Horn Jackson, is an Indigenous poet, writer, researcher and instructor. Her creative non-fiction essay can be found in Ethnosphere Literary Magazine, and the poem “Wiconi” (we-cho-nee) appears in Prairie Schooner. Her poem “Trillium” is published in the anthology Light Enters the Grove: Exploring Cuyahoga Valley National Park through Poetry by Kent State University Press. A special honor was serving as a guest editor of The Listening Eye, the Kent State Geauga Campus literary magazine. Kimberlee has been awarded a dissertation writing fellowship from the Louisville Institute for 2024-2025.