We’re grateful to Post45 board members, past and present, and an Open Access Award from @openlibhums.org for sponsoring the prize competition.

www.openlibhums.org/news/760/

It was an honor to read 80 innovative, ambitious submissions by early-career scholars, and we are delighted to publish this special issue featuring the very best of those essays.

Prize Committee: Nia Judelson, @anniemcc.bsky.social, Sean McCann, Rachel Greenwald Smith, and @arthurzw.bsky.social

@emmywaldman.bsky.social’s "Metamorphoses of the Spiral: Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!" moves deftly between Spiegelman's signature spiral motifs and his oscillations between biographical filiation and modernist affiliation.
post45.org/2025/08/meta...

Marie Buck, in her essay "For Malcolm and Embodied Collectivity in the Early Black Arts Movement,” reevaluates the uses of masculinity in 1960s Black cultural politics, demonstrating that Black masculinity, as metaphor, was never reducible to Black Macho.

post45.org/2025/08/for-...

In "The Variant: Form as Deliberative Practice,” Anna Moser writes on literary variants from Emily Dickinson through Susan Howe to query a feminism whose ideal subject is she-who-choses, arguing that poetic form allows us to see the complexity of choosing itself.

post45.org/2025/08/the-...

@michaelharrington.bsky.social’s, "Wild West Fringe: The Cowboy’s Queer Trace," limns a vivid archive of "camp-cowboy imagery," foregrounding the traces of queer and Black life that not only pervade, but establish, the image of the American cowboy.
post45.org/2025/08/wild...

@mitchtherieau.bsky.social's "The Ambient Mode” reads Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun as the self-dissolving cli-fi of slow apocalypse, articulating a broader theory of the ambient as the dissolving of climate “background” into daily “foreground.”

post45.org/2025/08/the-...

Amanda Jennifer Su’s "The Dragon Lady and the Cold War" finds, in Pearl S. Buck's Imperial Woman, both a liberal critique of American gender ideology and a reckoning with the complicity with liberal empire that would bedevil feminist thought in the decades to come.

post45.org/2025/08/the-...

These articles “reflect precisely the diversity of work that emerging scholars are doing across the field…suggesting that despite obstacles, the post45 literary and cultural studies remains both remarkably vibrant and enduringly vital” (Co-Editor @anniemcc.bsky.social) post45.org/2025/08/priz...