In a release on April 26, the Epiphany literary journal announced the selection of eight student writers for the inaugural Breakout 8 Writers Prize. The prize, sponsored by The Authors Guild, seeks to recognize emerging literary voices and bring visibility to the writers of our future by honoring eight student authors.  

Judges Tracy O’Neill, Hannah Tinti, and Alexander Chee selected the winners from hundreds of submissions of graduate and undergraduate poets and prose writers. Prize winners will receive a $250 cash prize, a year-long mentorship from O’Neill, membership to the Authors Guild, and other publication opportunities.

Here are this year’s Epiphany Breakout 8 Writers:

Yuxi Lin
Lin is a Chinese-American poet living in New York. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, Spilled Milk, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Southern Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She graduated from Davidson College and is currently an MFA candidate at New York University, where she received the Lillian Vernon Fellowship.

Marc Castel de Lucas
Lucas is a second-year undergraduate at the University of California-Berkeley studying literature in Spanish, English, and French. Prior to attending UC Berkeley, he studied at the University of Alabama (where he placed first in the University's creative writing contest as a first-year) and worked at the Mayor of San Francisco's Office of Education, the Office of the Mayor of Oakland, and the Felony Division of the Office of the San Francisco District Attorney. He is of Spanish and American citizenship, upbringing, ancestry, and heritage, and intends to work within the field of Spanish-English primary school education, ideally as a teacher of literature and philosophy in a bilingual high school.

Edith Lee
Lee grew up in New Zealand and is now in her final year at Colorado College. She is pursuing a bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing.

Amber Wheeler Bacon
Bacon lives, writes, and teaches on the coast in South Carolina. She is an MFA candidate in the Bennington Writing Seminars and is on the board of directors of the South Carolina Writers Association. She’s currently working on a story collection and a novel. This is her first publication.

Jiaming Tang
Tang is a Brooklyn-based writer of queer immigrant fiction. His interests lie in representing marginalized experience through allegory and unconventional storytelling. He studies creative writing at Purchase College, SUNY.

Amy Lee Lillard
Lillard is a writer and editor based in Des Moines, Iowa. Her fiction has appeared in Atlas and Alice and Home is Elsewhere: The Berlin Writing Prize 2017 Winners Anthology. She holds an MA in literature from Northwestern University, and will complete her MFA in fiction writing from the Pan-European Program at Cedar Crest College in 2018. She has been a professional advertising and communications writer in Chicago and Des Moines for nearly two decades.

Rasheeda Saka
Shaka is currently an undergraduate at Princeton University studying English literature with minors in creative writing and Spanish. In the past, she has studied fiction with Neel Mukherjee, Angela Flournoy, and Kirstin Quade.

Alisson Wood
Wood’s prose and poetry have been published in places including The New York Times, Catapult, and Dovetail. She is the founder of Pigeon Pages, a woman-run Brooklyn reading series and online literary journal. Currently, Wood is a candidate for an MFA in fiction at NYU. She is at work on a memoir.