Emily W. Pease

Long For This World

Winner of the 2025 New Women's Voices Contest, Finishing Line Press

Forthcoming in September, 2026.

Emily W. Pease is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Williamsburg, VA, where she has taught writing at William & Mary.

She is the 2025 winner of the William Matthews Poetry Prize at the Asheville Poetry Review and the 2025 winner of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in Juniper, Litmosphere, One, The Florida Review, and Rattle. Her collection of short stories, Let Me Out Here, won the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Award at Hub City Press in 2018. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

“Pease’s prose demands attention and refuses to let readers avert their gazes from the near-constant sense of approaching disaster, a steady thrum of quiet doom”

– Kirkus Reviews
“[Pease’s] stories are at times dizzying and dark with a hint of dread, but also rich with texture, voice and wild beauty....powerful and exacting, funny and fierce—like Flannery O’Connor, but not too much like her.”

– Amber Wheeler Bacon, Ploughshares Blog
“Pease writes with a hypnotic prose that features a modern, truncated style and love for imagery....With so many individuals mired by circumstances beyond their control, it would be easy for these stories to turn into a litany of hopelessness. But Pease gives the characters the glimmer of hype, the possibility that their aching desires might come true.”

– Bill Glose, Virginia Living Magazine

Long For This World

“Pease’s prose demands attention and refuses to let readers avert their gazes from the near-constant sense of approaching disaster, a steady thrum of quiet doom”

“[Pease’s] stories are at times dizzying and dark with a hint of dread, but also rich with texture, voice and wild beauty....powerful and exacting, funny and fierce—like Flannery O’Connor, but not too much like her.”

Emily W. Pease