THE 2026 AMY AWARD WINNERS
🌟🌟
This year’s Runner-Up is also the Winner of the People’s Choice Award, so double congratulations to…
MARCELLE SHEHWARO
for How to Smuggle a Christmas Tree When You Are on Daesh’s Hit List?
Marcelle Shehwaro is a Syrian writer whose essays and commentary have appeared in Guernica, Al-Jumhuriya, ADI Magazine, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Institut Català Internacional per la Pau. Her blog, Dispatches from Syria, won the 2015 Online Journalism Award for Commentary. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from Columbia University and an MA in Human Rights and Cultural Diversity from the University of Essex, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2025. She is currently seeking representation for her memoir, Obvious as the Sun, about her experience as an activist during the Syrian revolution.
"I still don’t know whether buying a Christmas tree while I was on Daesh’s hit list was an act of resistance or simply a distraction, " says Marcelle. "I knew, even then, that it was bizarre. Years later, writing the story, I realized the tree had done something else: it had colored the memory. When I remember being wanted by Daesh, I remember the Christmas tree. When I remember them breaking into my house, the tree is there too. I had manufactured something into those memories that I had chosen myself. There was agency in that. Writing the essay as a ‘how-to’ was my way of surrendering to the absurdity of what had somehow become a perfectly ordinary wartime task." Instagram: @marcell_writing_profile
Marcelle will receive a cash prize of $500.
And the winner is…
🌟 JENNIFER ROBINSON
for Field Guide to Melissas
Our judge, Merilyn Simonds, was impressed by the creativity and originality, the polish and the unwavering literary strength of Jennifer Robinson’s Field Guide to Melissas.
Jennifer explains how she decided on her story’s unique structure: "As part of a creative nonfiction course, I was jotting down ideas for a hermit crab essay* — I had a recipe, a diagnostic report, a set of directions — when I hit on the idea of a field guide. I knew it could hold my current preoccupation with what Freud called the 'repetition compulsion,' which is the tendency to repeat the same negative relationship patterns over and over. The form of the field guide gave me an opportunity to explore my own negative patterns, to trace them back as far as I could, and, through the writing, begin to free myself."
{*What is a hermit crab essay? A bit like an actual hermit crab, this type of story/essay takes on the existing form of another type of writing to use as it structure.}
Jennifer Robinson lives on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg, Manitoba). She is a writer, a psychotherapist, a venerator of prairie skies and a scavenger of hope. Her work can be found in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Dalhousie Review, Prairie Fire, Geist, Chestnut Review, Grain, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2024 National Magazine Awards’ Gold Medal for Personal Journalism. With the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, she is hard at work on her first book.
Jennifer will receive a cash prize of $1000, generously donated by Amy MacRae's parents, Kerry and Betty Ho.