Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Stephen Wright Fiction 1990
Lauren Yee Drama 2019
Javier Zamora Nonfiction 2024
Ada Zhang Fiction 2024
Martha Zweig Poetry 1999

Selected winners

Ilya Kaminsky
2005
Dancing in Odessa
Poems

I see her windows open in the rain, laundry in the windows—

she rides a wild pony for my birthday,

a white pony on the seventh floor.

 

“And where will we keep it?” “On the balcony!”

the pony neighing on the balcony for nine weeks.

At the center of my life: my mother dances,

 

yes here, as in childhood, my mother

asks to describe the stages of my happiness—

she speaks of soups, she is of their telling:

 

between the regiments of saucers and towels,

she moves so fast—she is motionless,

opening and closing doors.

 

But what was happiness? A pony on the balcony!

My mother's past, a cloak she wore on her shoulder.

I drew an axis through the afternoon

 

to see her, sixty, courting a foreign language—

young, not young—my mother

gallops a pony on the seventh floor.

 

She becomes a stranger and acts herself, opens

what is shut, shuts what is open.

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Christopher Cokinos
2003
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons.  They closed over the sky like an eyelid.

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Colson Whitehead
2000
The Intuitionist
A Novel

“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”

 

She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.

 

The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”

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Madeleine George
2016
The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence
A Play

MERRICK

(resumptive)

So that's why I'm running. To dismantle the institutions that have enslaved us and humiliated us and conned us out of our money for far too long.

 

WATSON

You're running for election to the government so you can dismantle the government?

 

MERRICK

(no hesitation, total confidence)

Yes.

 

WATSON smiles pleasantly.

 

WATSON

Cool. Good luck.

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Daniel Orozco
2011
Orientation
And Other Stories

There are no personal phone calls allowed. We do, however, allow for emergencies. If you must make an emergency phone call, ask your supervisor first. If you can’t find your supervisor, ask Phillip Spiers, who sits over there. He’ll check with Clarissa Nicks, who sits over there. If you make an emergency phone call without asking, you may be let go.

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Jane Mead
1992
The Lord and the General Din of the World
Poems

There is a strange world

in the changing of a light bulb,

the waxing of a bookshelf

I think I could grow by,

as into a dusty dream

in which each day layers

against one just past

and molds the one to come,

content as cabbage

drudging towards harvest.

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