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

Josip Novakovich
1997
Apricots from Chernobyl
Essays

The police ask me to empty my pockets. I turn them inside out and lay my miserabilia on the table. Two policemen quite unashamedly feel my thighs and ass, which tickles me. With clinical concentration they examine the stuff on the table. It is an obscene invasion of my privacy, more so than if they had turned my asshole inside out and inspected it under a microscope—any microbiologist could tell you that there we are remarkably similar. In pockets turned inside out you can see how we differ.

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Martha Zweig
1999
Vinegar Bone
Poems

He did it deliberately &

so when the police tracked him down he was

able to explain it so

clearly they had to

agree. Still, they hadn’t done it.

 

Anyway, he’d checked it out &

it was what they’d suspected,

women! – women just

opened & spilled, there was

nothing special in there after all.

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Mary Swander
1994
Heaven-And-Earth House
Poems

We are the nothing-to-lose ones,

the try-anything-once ones,

weed seeds inside our cells –

dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –

roots sunk in, for it is the tips

that count, reaching out to tap

new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,

the stomata, those little mouths

opening, closing, sucking in air

in the evening when we boil

wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.

Like cures like, we hear in the morning

when we brush ourselves with

vegetable fiber in the shower,

beat ourselves with our fists.

(This is no crazier than anything else.)

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Antoinette Nwandu
2018
Pass Over
A Play

                    MOSES

yo ass gon rise up to yo full potential too

gon git up off dis block

man

you remember

dat sunday school

ol reverend Missus be like

 

                    (as reverend missus)

sed uh

do you wanna cross dat river now chillun

sed uh

do you wanna cross dat river now chillum

 

                    KITCH

                    (gasping)

pass ovuh

 

                    MOSES

yeah nigga damn

i feel like we cud do dis shit

you feel me

git up off dis block

 

                    KITCH

amen!

 

                    MOSES

be all we cud be

 

                    KITCH

yes lawd!

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Vanessa Angélica Villarreal
2019
Beast Meridian

That I commune with the dead as I oil your feet. My house at the throat of the river, the door to this world, I wait for you. That I ask of the spirit and receive the knowledges: yerbabuena, vela de virgen, baño de alhucema. Cut the joint at the hoof & fatten the soup. Accept this offering, thank the plant. That I love you with the knowledge of our ways lost to violence. That you will call me up from the silt in your bones.

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Alison C. Rollins
2026
Black Bell

A Child is Like a Clarinet

for Eliza Harris and Henri Akoka

Similes are dangerous.
To equate a person to

an object, an instrument
no less, is a risk.

A child is like a clarinet.
A mother is like a clarinetist.

Personhood posits
promising possibilities.

Poems are willing to die.
Poems dare, just as Eliza

Harris leaped onto pieces
of ice to cross the frozen

Ohio River with her baby
in her hands. Poems flee,

just as Henri Akoka
jumped onto the top of

a moving train with his
clarinet under his arm.

One of these things
is not like the other.

Can’t you tell? Mouthpiece
from lips, flesh from wood.

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