Forsberg Prize for Fiction 2025 - Winner Announced

Avalon Park Press is pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural 2025 Forsberg Prize for Fiction:

Future Perfect

by Matthew James Babcock

Future Perfect is a collection of short stories exploring the complexities of human relationships and the passing of time.

Each story considers milestones of life: childhood, growing up, adulthood, death. Future Perfect invites us to detach from linear time and to observe the minute and grand moments all at once.

Future Perfect will be available for purchase in early 2026.

Matthew James Babcock is the author of Four Tales of Troubled Love (fiction), Heterodoxologies (creative nonfiction), Points of Reference (poetry), Strange Terrain (poetry), Hidden Motion (poetry), and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis (criticism). His awards include the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, the AML Poetry Award, the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Short Fiction, and Winner of Press 53’s Open Awards Anthology Prize for his novella, “He Wanted to be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker.” He recently served as Arthur Dolsen Visiting Writer at Idaho State University.