Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Rita Bullwinkel Fiction 2022
Michael Burkard Poetry 1988
Michael Byers Fiction 1998
Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum Fiction 2005
Ryan Call Fiction 2011
Sheila Callaghan Drama 2007
Kayleb Rae Candrilli Poetry 2019
Francisco Cantú Nonfiction 2017
Anthony Carelli Poetry 2015
Ina Cariño Poetry 2022
Hayden Carruth Poetry 1986
Emily Carter Fiction 2001
Elaine Castillo Fiction 2026
Joan Chase Fiction 1987
Alexander Chee Fiction 2003
Dan Chiasson Poetry 2004
Don Mee Choi Poetry 2011
Yoon Choi Fiction 2024
Shayok Misha Chowdhury Drama 2024
Mia Chung Drama 2023
Paul Clemens Nonfiction 2011
Ama Codjoe Poetry 2023
Anthony Cody Poetry 2022
Robert Cohen Fiction 2000
Christopher Cokinos Nonfiction 2003
Clarence Coo Drama 2017
Jordan E. Cooper Drama 2021
Amanda Coplin Fiction 2013
Leopoldine Core Fiction 2015
Eduardo C. Corral Poetry 2011
Elwin Cotman Fiction 2025
Patrick Cottrell Fiction 2018
Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig Drama 2024
Mark Cox Poetry 1987
Douglas Crase Poetry 1985

Selected winners

Hanna Pylväinen
2012
We Sinners
A Novel

Her plan had been to clean in the middle of the night, so her mother would wake to an empty kitchen sink, but as she stood in the foyer, the bathroom fan beating loudly and uselessly, the mess before her made her want to cry; being in a family of eleven made her want to cry, the way someone had soaked up the dog’s pee but not thrown away the paper towel, the way responsibility divided by eleven meant no one was really responsible.

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Elaine Castillo
2026
Moderation, A Novel

Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated. 

From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

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Xan Forest Phillips
2021
HULL

Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
            alone, I must acknowledge a femme

            

            fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense

 

so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.

 

How her trembling must have lullabied
                   my drunk tongue the intricacies

                  

                   of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed

 

all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.

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Frank Stewart
1986
Flying the Red Eye
Poems

Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.

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Leopoldine Core
2015
When Watched
Stories

She remembers sensing—almost smelling—that he wanted to kill her. Or that for a split second the thought was spreading itself in his mind. She remembers the terrible little theater of his eyes, which she had always thought to be blue. But looking at them in the afternoon glare, she saw that they weren’t even a little bit blue. They were grey.

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Matthew Stadler
1995
The Sex Offender
A Novel

“Do you masturbate?” he pried.

 

“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.

 

“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”

 

“Work?”

 

“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.

 

“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”

 

THE SEX OFFENDER © 1994 by Matthew Stadler; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

 

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