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2025 Constance Rooke CNF Prize Winner: Hayden Park

Congratulations to Hayden Park, winner of the 2025 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her entry, “The First Law of Adoptee Physics,” was chosen by final judge Siavash Saadlou.

Hayden Park will receive the $1,250 prize and publication in our spring 2026 issue #234!

Here's what Siavash Saadlou had to say about the winning piece: While brimming with music-laced metaphors, “The First Law of Adoptee Physics offers a potent and poignant account of the author’s experience growing up as an adopted child. By turns expansive and exquisite, the essay constitutes a soul-searching conversation between you and the narrator—one you can ill afford to interrupt—and its lyrical, lapidary prose is reminiscent of lilting lines found in the poetry of Tomas Tranströmer. I hope the readers of “The First Law of Adoptee Physics” appreciate the metaphysical beauty of its contradictions: the way it holds love and loss, fact and forgery, presence and absence, in the same breath, like a chord of notes lingering long after the music stops.

Hayden Park

 

Hayden Park is a high school senior from Southern California, a writer and musician whose work often infuses music with memory. She is the winner of The Malahat Review’s 2025 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize and a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Medalist. A classically trained pianist and violinist, she performs regularly with orchestras and chamber ensembles. Her poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Slippery Elm (Contest Issue 2025), REDAMANCY Magazine, and Yin Literary Magazine, as well as in anthologies from One Page Poetry and TulipTree Publishing. She plans to pursue literature and creative writing alongside music at the university level. Beyond writing and music, she is also interested in visual art and photography, and enjoys exploring projects that combine writing, music, and image.


Keep an eye out for an interview with Hayden on her CNF Prize win in our January 2026 newsletter.


Siavash Saadlou

 

Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer and literary translator whose memoir excerpt, “My Mom Told Me,” was selected as a Notable Essay for the Best American Essays 2023. His poems have been anthologized in Woman, Life, Freedom (Guernica Editions) and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press). His short stories, essays, and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, American Literary Review, and New England Review, among other journals. He is the winner of the 2024 McNally Robinson Booksellers Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2024 Susan Atefat Creative Nonfiction Prize, the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize, and the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. Most recently, he was second place in the 2025 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. He has received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center.

 

Finalists for the 2025 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize:

Emily Cann, "Trapped in the Bottleneck"
Richard Chirimwami, "What We Pray For in the Dark"
Sophie Kohn, "Wildhood"
Sina Queyras, "Cringe"
Jenifer Sutherland, "The Bridge of One Hair"
Russell Thornton, "228 East 27th"

Thank you to Siavash Saadlou for judging, and to all entrants for your ongoing support of our literary contests!