Reed Magazine Wins Third Pushcart Prize
Nonfiction story from Issue 156 earns magazine’s third prize in four years
Reed Magazine, SJSU’s literary journal, has won its third Pushcart Prize. Cover art of this latest issue by Hana Lock, winner of the 2023 Mary Blair Award for Art in the Pushcart-winning Issue 156.
“Reed Magazine,” California’s oldest literary journal and the literary magazine of San José State University, is proud to announce it has been awarded a Pushcart Prize—the journal’s third such award in four years.
The personal narrative “Growing Up Godless,” by Robert Isaacs, which appears in “Reed Magazine”, Issue 156 (2023), is slated for publication in “Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses,” to be released in November 2025.
“I’m startled and humbled by this honor,” says Isaacs, “and grateful to the team at ‘Reed Magazine’ who championed the piece! I hope it provokes thought for further readers, whatever their faith.”
The essay, which also won the magazine’s own Gabriele Rico Challenge for Nonfiction in 2023, explores in crisp language and poignant detail the author’s unusual perspective on faith, as a cathedral choir singer whose family abandoned religion three generations ago.
Editor in Chief Helen Meservey describes Isaacs’s prose as “graceful, wise, voicey, and sharp, some of the best writing I have seen submitted to ‘Reed.’”
Issue 156 Senior Nonfiction Editor Ryan Steel, ’24 MFA Creative Writing, and editors Allegra Balbuena, ’25 MFA Creative Writing, and Isaiah Jeremiah Reyes, ’24 Creative Writing, nominated Isaacs’s story from among nearly 400 nonfiction submissions.
This year’s award follows two previous Pushcart Prizes, awarded in 2021 for Joseph Sigurdson’s essay, “Wishbone,” which also won that year’s Gabriele Rico Prize for Nonfiction, and in 2020 for Kurt Luchs’s poem, “Father’s Belt.”
“Reed Magazine” has evolved from a pamphlet of student poetry that went under the name “The Acorn” to a stout volume that annually publishes emerging and established writers and artists who submit short stories, essays, poetry, and art in record numbers from around the globe. The magazine has also just launched a podcast, “In the Reeds,” available on YouTube. Ranked high among literary journals for its competitive contests, in 2024 “Reed” was named by Chill Subs as one of the Top 20 literary magazines in the United States.
For more information, please contact Editor in Chief Helen Meservey.
