PHIL LIT Pushcart Prize Nominations
Each year, the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses invites small presses and literary journals to nominate up to six pieces that best represent their pages (and their ethos). This post will serve as an ongoing home for PHIL LIT’s Pushcart nominees.
The PHIL in PHIL LIT stands for both PHILosophy and PHILanthropy. Our guiding philosophy is human-loving: we aim to uplift the human spirit while remaining honest about the realities we face, and to resist the scarcity mindsets and fear-driven narratives that so often define our era.
2025 Pushcart Prize Nominations
PHIL LIT Journal – Fall 2025, Volume 1
For our debut year, we had one publication before the deadline of Dec. 1st. In that publication there were several pieces our editors kept circling back to that lingered long after we closed the issue, but we were only allotted 6 pieces to nominate. We’re honored to nominate the following:
Poetry
“Pink Moon 24’” by Jocelyn Cole
“To Heal Well” by A. Wilder Westgate
Fiction
This page will be updated as future PHIL LIT issues head out into the world and, occasionally, into the Pushcart Prize envelope. To our nominees: thank you for trusting PHIL LIT with your words. “We believe literature is a vessel and words are spells—thoughts charged by sound that stir the soul into action.”
Fearless & Human First,
The PHIL LIT Editorial Team




This is awesome! Thanks for championing online writers, and huge congratulations to all nominees
Congratulations! What an honor! And thanks for taking the trouble to share this good work!