Celebrating the 2025 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize Winner!
The Headlight Review is thrilled to announce the winner of our 2025 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize: Water Falls by Lois Wolfe. The Grooms Prize honors the work and legacy of Anthony Grooms. This year’s judge, James Cherry, had this to say about Wolfe’s story:
“Water Falls is magnificent execution of character development. These well-developed and fully realized characters, with their own stories to tell, could exist on the page and not need a plot. But it’s through their actions and dialogue that they become unforgettable. Storytelling at its best. We know these people or have known them and after the story ends, we want to know what are they doing now.”
Lois Wolfe
Lois Wolfe is an author and educator whose background spans print journalism and college teaching. She grew up in a West Virginia coal mining town a few miles south of the Mason-Dixon. Her poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review and Coastlines; her short fiction can be found in The Appalachian Review, Roanoke Review, Levee Magazine and Prime Number. Her short fiction received the Northern Virginia Review’s 2021 Robert Bausch Fiction Prize. She’s the author of two novels, The Schemers and Mask of Night. She resides in the Southern Appalachian Highlands of North Carolina.
In 2026, Headlight will produce a chapbook version of Wolfe’s wonderful story and feature an excerpt in the next issue of the magazine.
In addition to Wolfe’s Water Falls, James Cherry selected two runners up. They are Audiophile by Evan Morgan Williams and God of the Gator by Alan Sincic. Here’s what Cherry had to say about these fine works:
Audiophile: A well-structured, complex, and dense bildungsroman. This has nothing to do with thirty three and a third vinyl records, but it has everything to do with them and they become the soundtrack to our own family relations, sexual awakenings, and gender and social inequality. This story needs to be read over and over.
God of the Gator: A thoroughly original creation of prose that would make Flannery or Faulkner blush. The setting becomes as important as the other remarkable characters who leap from the page.
Selections from both submissions will appear in our 2026 special issue, “New Southern Writing,” later next year.
Congratulations to Wolfe and the runners up!
About the Judge
James E. Cherry is the author of four collections of poetry, two novels and a collection of short fiction. His novel, Edge of the Wind, was reissued in 2022 from Stephen F. Austin State University Press and his latest collection of verse, Between Chance and Mercy was published by Aquarius Press/Willow Books in 2024. He has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, a Lillian Smith Book Award and is the recipient of fellowships from the Martha Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and Kimbilio for Black Fiction. Cherry has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and is Board Chairman of the Griot Collective of West Tennessee, a poetry workshop. He resides in Tennessee. Visit jamesEcherry.com for more.
