Out of Order Challenge Winners

Some challenges are easy to judge because you can immediately tell what’s working. This was not one of them.

Out of Order asked writers to disrupt sequence while still creating poems that felt intentional, and many of the strongest entries only revealed their full shape after a second or third read. We found ourselves flipping back through poems, reconsidering connections, and thinking carefully about why a writer chose to place one moment before another. It made for a challenging judging process, but also a rewarding one. Sometimes the way a story is told matters just as much as the story itself.

Here are the top 30... and yes they're in order.

🏆 Winners

Postcards from India, in no particular order by Imola Tóth

Imola Tóth tells this story through a travelogue scattered across time, with each fragmented postcard feeling like a memory that surfaces unexpectedly. That structure works because it invites the reader to experience disorientation, longing, and recognition simultaneously, rather than lining them up in neat order.

henceforth and so on and look over there by ali

ali lets the poem’s structure spiral out mid-sentence and mid-action, so that moment of forgetting to text a friend or count ‘hence’ lands as both a punchline and honest fracture, catching the reader off guard in a way that feels true to experience.

Decoherence by Iris Obscura

Iris Obscura lands a devastating blow with the line 'My father dies twice,' letting the final, everyday loss of memory carry as much weight as the hospital death. That reversal lingers and reveals how grief continues long after the moment we expect it to end.

VHS by Amanda Abela

Amanda Abela structures the poem like an old VHS tape, using rewinds, pauses, and fast forwards to move through a life out of sequence. As the fragments accumulate, the poem suggests that memory doesn’t follow chronology so much as it returns to the moments that refuse to let us go.

A Glamor by Andrea Corwin

Andrea Corwin builds the poem around a sharp voice, with memorable details like flicking a Sephora rewards card at a cabbie. The personality is so vivid that even the poem’s most absurd leaps and reversals feel completely natural.

🎖️ Runners-up

• After Heartache by ChellyWrites
• Day & Night by Melissa Ingoldsby
• The Algorithm Knows You Better Than God by Tim Carmichael
• Past Meets Present by Sara Wilson
• Sequentia by Edward Swafford
• still life by John Cox
• unbound by kp
• Ace of Cups, Reversed by Tyler Clark (they/them)
• lattes and lies by Heather Hubler
• Fragmented Family by Rowan Finley
• Grandfather's Burial by Kera Hollow
• Two-Day Plink by Caitlin Charlton
• Meeting Adjourned by Harper Lewis
• Backwards Thinking is the Gateway Drug by Jada Ferguson
• The Letter by Kelli Sheckler-Amsden

🏅 Honorable Mentions

• Later by Cristal S.
• Cause and Effect by Paul Stewart
• ...And She Screamed So Loud by Kristen Keenon Fisher
• Tomorrow’s Leftovers by Leslie Writes
• Every Day Since Covid Is Both Yesterday And Tomorrow by Cali Loria
• Inheritance by Aaron Morrison
• Where He Belongs by SUEDE the poet
• Motherhood by Julie Lacksonen
• Uncomfortable Silence by Sandy Gillman
• bont to frack by Connor Mudie