CELJ Award Winners

2025 Award Winners and Judges’ Comments

Updated and awarded Jan. 9, 2026 ~ Scroll down to see past years’ winners

Best Special Issue

JAMES BALDWIN REVIEW 10. Douglas Field, Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. McBride, eds.

Judges’ comments

"Joining exciting new scholarship on the relevance of James Baldwin's visionary insights for pressing questions in a growing number of fields to newly published lectures, The James Baldwin Review has done an outstanding job celebrating both their tenth year of publication and the 100th birthday of their namesake, James Baldwin. Expertly edited, this nearly 400-page issue comprises excellent scholarship relating to the continuing importance of Baldwin today as well as to his reception in his own time, which will prove generative for scholarship and creative work to come. For the initiate, this issue will serve as an excellent portrait of why they need to read James Baldwin now; for the specialist, this issue is a who's who of James Baldwin scholarship—and why they need to read his work more now!"

Best New Journal

REGENERATION. Stephanie Foote, Anthony Lioi, Dana Luciano, eds.

Judges’ comments

This is an exciting new journal in environmental studies whose open-access format is consistent with its interdisciplinary goals in environmental humanities. Issues reviewed by the judging panel included an inaugural double issue challenging some of the key paradigms in queer and trans studies. The judges were impressed with their expansive take on environmental humanities and predict Regeneration will make a big impact on multiple fields by publishing bold new work. The journal's emphasis on collaboration and open access seem like good models for what NEW journals should be doing to push academic publishing out of the stone age. We need more new journals doing this! 

honorable mention: DISASTER STUDIES. Soraya Boudia, Kaira Zoe Cañete, Ksenia Chmutina, Kim Fortun, Ricardo Fuentealba, Julia Irwin, Scott Knowles, Jacob Remes, Monica Sanders, Ryuma Shineha, eds.

The Journal of Disaster Studies not only studies disaster from a wide range of disciplines, spanning the humanities, social sciences, and sciences; it also questions the very idea of what is considered a disaster/disastrous — whether the disaster is merely evental or whether its temporality is an entirely different one. Contributors also consider a wide range of geographic locations (from, e.g., Sami territories to China), events, processes, and causalities in their analyses. Truly interdisciplinary, JDS appears to be the first conceptually-oriented publication to study disasters.The journal understands its project as a global one and has a multi-national, multilingual editorial collective. On account of its strong commitment to interdisciplinarity, global coverage and audiences, and its temporal range (from the historical to the contemporary) JDS receives an Honorable Mention as Best New Journal 2025.

Best Digital Feature

MODERNISM/modernity’s cluster on Hope Mirrlees’ Paris. Anjali Nerlekar & Faye Hammill eds.

Judges’ comments

Modernism/modernity's cluster on Hope Mirrlees' Paris (the book and the city) makes use of the digital format to present a multiperspectival, multimedia (including audio) dossier on the centenary of the publication Paris: A Poem of this in part overlooked female avantgardiste/moderniste. The eight contributions and detailed introduction moreover center on fresh topics such as colonialism, plasticity, feminism, and new materialism. Mirrlees' poems themselves are presented in visually appealing form, one instance in which the cluster embodies the digital (as journal co-editor Nerlekar writes). Throughout, the open-access dossier also integrates (other) images in salient ways. 

Best Public Outreach

THE SO WHAT, ARTHURIANA. Dorsey Armstrong, ed. 

Judges’ comments

The So What undertakes a highly successful push to make the Middle Ages available to critical thought about the present. Topics include queerness, Blackness, epidemics (e.g., COVID), transness, the Right, and other urgent concerns. Notably, the feature also includes public activities and links into public events that have taken place. The style guide encourages accessibility, ethics around image use, and guidance on writing for public audiences. The judging panel appreciated the So What’s sustainability model that goes beyond a one-off public engagement and praised the framing that encourages non-academics to explore their interests in Medievalism. This concerted effort to reach both non-academic as well as academic publics deserves a public outreach award.

Phoenix Award

LABOR. Julie Greene, ed.

Judges’ comments

LABOR has undertaken a very significant revitalization effort. The journal has connected a new, appealing visual identity with an extensive overhaul of the journal's leadership, content (thematic foci, art, artistic recovery, broadened international coverage, etc.), languages (articles in languages other than English), reach (founding the section Going Public), and activities (e.g., instituting an archive at Brooklyn College Library). Changes in editorial leadership and vision have led to more breadth in submissions, in terms of authorial voice, institutional location, and career stage. The Going Public feature seems promising, and the journal’s involvement with actual social activity (an exhibition, securing an archival space for artwork) beyond the pages of the journal is laudable. In summary, the transformation of LABOR warrants an award dedicated to editorial and design achievement. 

Distinguished Editor

CHARLES H. ROWELL, CALLALOO

Judges’ comments

Charles Rowell founded Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters in 1976 as a publishing venue for African American southern writers, which he continued to lead as a chief editor for close to half a century. His vision and stewardship of the journal soon expanded its purview to encompass a truly global dialogue among writers and scholars of the African diaspora much beyond North America and the English language. By all measures Callaloo has been a tremendous success in cultivating new voices and launching the career of important authors, future Pulitzer Prize winners and Poets Laureate, such as Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, and Yusef Komunyakaa. The journal’s hefty issues feature unusually rich content, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, literary and cultural criticism, photo essays, interviews, and conversations, as well as book reviews.

Those who nominate and write in support his candidacy for the Distinguished Editor Award speak to his prestige and influence in the field. Described by one recommender as “the incubator for excellence,” his sponsorship of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops further exemplified his leadership in the journal's mission of mentoring young writers. They also affirm that the mark of excellence for early-career specialists in this field is to be published in Callaloo under Rowell’s editorship. It is clear that Callaloo is unparalleled in its field due in no small part to Charles Rowell’s prodigious leadership.

Beyond the printed page, Rowell initiated the Callaloo Conferences. Staged in leading universities around the world, these gatherings facilitated cross-disciplinary and cross-generational conversation and further extended the journal’s public outreach. Rowell mentored Poet Laureate Rita Dove and was a vital force in shaping this incredible flowering of literary and critical talents inside and outside the university. As a sign of her long-term admiration for Rowell, Dove’s letter of support recalls how she collaborated with Rowell on the historic two-day symposium “Oil on the Waters: The Black Diaspora” featuring preeminent poets, novelists, and essayists.  As Dove writes, “For the past five decades, Charles Rowell has been the preeminent observer – call him traveler, cultural diplomat, editor-with-a-mission, elucidator of artistic schools and mores – of African diaspora cultures in the Americas, and Callaloo remains the singular beacon of this truly multicultural phenomenon.” 

Rowell’s hand in guiding this intellectual initiative, keeping the journal fresh for so long, is not just a testament to his excellence but also an important measure of how significantly the editorial arts fashion intellectual work. A good editor fashions the agenda. They look forward at least five years to emerging scholarly, humanist and arts trends. A great editor also shapes how the expression of newness occurs. Rowell’s accomplishments in these areas are clearly outstanding and have already been recognized by his peers through the Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s Madam C.J. Walker Award in 2018 and the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing earlier this year.