We are excited to announce the recipients of the 2025 Big Other Literary Citizenship Award. This award aims to recognize outstanding efforts toward supporting the work of innovative writers and adventurous presses, through reviewing, editing, publishing, and/or promoting books, as well as encouraging, building, and sustaining a robust literary culture.

These exemplary literary citizens will be further celebrated at the 2025 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony (date to be announced).

And the awardees are:

Joseph Schreiber

Joseph Schreiber is a reader, critic, editor, amateur photographer, and queered parent of grown children, whose critical work focuses on translated and experimental fiction as well as literary nonfiction, engaging broader concerns around philosophy, mental health, sexuality, and gender. Based in western Canada—though increasingly restless, as he puts it—he serves as Essays Editor at Minor Literature[s] and was previously Criticism/Nonfiction Editor at 3:AM Magazine (2017–2020), as well as an editor at The Scofield. His reviews and essays have appeared in Numéro Cinq, The Quarterly Conversation, The Rusty Toque, Sultan’s Seal, RIC Journal, and elsewhere. He writes online as @roughghosts across platforms, though, by his own admission, more quietly in some places than others.

Micah Zevin

Micah Zevin is a poet and librarian living in Jackson Heights, Queens, NY with his wife, a playwright. He is the author of Metal/Heavy. His writing has appeared in American Journal of Poetry, Big Other, Five2OneMagazine, Heavy Feather Review, Jokes Review, Maudlin House, The Newtown Literary Journal and Blog, The Otter, Poetry and Politics, Post (Blank), Reality Beach, The Tower Journal, and the “What Rough Beast Series” at Indolent Books. Curator and host of many reading events at the Queens Public Library, Zevin also founded and curates The Risk of Discovery Reading Series, an open mic/poetry prompt workshop now at Blue Cups in Woodside, Queens, NY.