Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
D.J. Waldie Nonfiction 1998
David Foster Wallace Fiction 1987
Anthony Walton Nonfiction 1998
Esmé Weijun Wang Nonfiction 2018
Weike Wang Fiction 2018
Anne Washburn Drama 2015
Teddy Wayne Fiction 2011
Charles Harper Webb Poetry 1998
Kerri Webster Poetry 2011
Joshua Weiner Poetry 2002
Annie Wenstrup Poetry 2025
Timberlake Wertenbaker Drama 1989
Kate Wheeler Fiction 1994
Simone White Poetry 2017
Colson Whitehead Fiction 2000
Marianne Wiggins Fiction 1989
Amy Wilentz Nonfiction 1990
Damien Wilkins Fiction 1992
Claude Wilkinson Poetry 2000
Phillip B. Williams Poetry 2017
Greg Williamson Poetry 1998
Tracey Scott Wilson Drama 2004
August Wilson Drama 1986
Milo Wippermann Poetry 2023
Tobias Wolff Fiction 1989
Tobias Wolff Nonfiction 1989
John Wray Fiction 2001
Stephen Wright Fiction 1990
Austin Wright Fiction 1985
Franz Wright Poetry 1991
Austin Wright Nonfiction 1985
C.D. Wright Poetry 1989
Lauren Yee Drama 2019
Javier Zamora Nonfiction 2024
Ada Zhang Fiction 2024

Selected winners

Julie Sheehan
2008
Orient Point
Poems

Coyotes invade. They claim to be the truth.

Black bears nose the bougainvillea, moving

eastward, indiscriminate, original.

Our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain,

our nature disobediently tends toward nature.

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Diannely Antigua
2020
Ugly Music

The last time I cried to your picture

was the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.

It was about her and you and how

all the things I could touch would disappear,

like your hand or dirty boxers on the floor,

or the liver spots on her arms, the space

of her missing tooth.

 

I’ve been having that dream again.

The one where I make a fortune selling my used underwear 

and I buy her a tombstone. 

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Elizabeth Spires
1996
Worldling
Poems

I found a white stone on the beach

inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.

All night I’d slept in fits and starts,

my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.

And then morning. And then a walk,

the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it

and wished a wish I cannot tell.

It fit in my hand like a hand gently

holding my hand through a sleepless night.

A stone so like, so unlike,

all the others it could only be mine.

 

The worldess white stone of my life!

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Lewis Robinson
2003
Officer Friendly and Other Stories

“Now, because it’s his birthday and he wasn’t supposed to make it this far, he asked that we throw him a bash, like the old Augusta blowouts, and he asked that at midnight we shoot him dead.”

 

I stared at him. He didn’t waver.

 

“We figure you’re the best guy to do it,” he said, slapping a hand on my shoulder.

 

“I’ve never even shot a gun,” I said.

 

He pulled up my shirt and took the gun from the back of my pants. “It’s pretty basic. Point and pull. You’ve seen the movies.” He aimed the pistol at the portrait of the old man, said “Bang” and faked the recoil, then blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.

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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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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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