Grist 20’s ProForma Contest Winners
Hayden Arnett
September 14th, 2026
Every summer, Grist’s ProFroma contest receives scores of your submissions in experimental and hybrid forms. We received many impressive entries this year, and loved encountering your most courageous work. It was Ellen Kombiyil’s “Zuihitsu on Modification” and other works, though, that took the prize. This year’s judge, Gabriel Antonio Reed, chose Ellen’s packet as winner, and she will receive $1,000 as well publication in Issue 20 and online this spring.
Gabriel said of the winning work: “These poems struck me at once. Ellen Kombiyil calls ‘Zuihitsu on Modification’ a ‘revisionist erasure,’ and this energy animates the other pieces: a rare meeting between restless imagination and practiced economy. Every word shines in a field where the poet’s hand is always visible, reshaping analogous and received forms, with their limiting histories, into new patterns alive with lyric insight. The poet’s vision is present in every gesture; I had to catch my breath when I read a parenthetical stanza in ‘Drill for Foot Troops Becomes a Drag Ensemble’: ‘( . . . this / man in paren- / theses / is / held).’ Where form once confined it now opens and invites the reader into the poet’s reimagined world.”
Ellen Kombiyil is a visual artist, poet, educator, and author of two novels: Love as Invasive Species and Histories of the Future Perfect. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, and Ploughshares, and her most recent manuscript—The American Journal of Insanity’s Diagnostic on the Plumbing and Wiring of Females—was the recipient of the Anhinga Press Visual Poetry Series Award.
Gabriel also chose Dipanjali Roy’s “SPEC” and Ashwini Bhasi’s “Spill What You Carry” as runners-up. Grist will publish both these impressive works online in the spring.
The other shortlisted writers were: Michael Chang, Caitlyn Curran, Jen Karetnick, Julia Kolchinsky, Zeid Omran, Misha Tentser, and Alexis Wright.
Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone who submitted their work! ProForma will open again next summer—follow Grist on social media or sign up to our newsletter for updates.
