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
August Wilson Drama 1986
Tracey Scott Wilson Drama 2004
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

Sylvia Khoury
2021
Against the Hillside

ANTHONY
I’m sorry, sir.
I don’t think I understand.


MATT
She took her kid and left in the middle of the night.
To go where?
She’s in the middle of the desert.


ANTHONY
Sir, if I may.


MATT
You may.


ANTHONY
Her leaving
What does any of that have to do with us?


MATT
What does that have to do with us?
We did that, Anthony.
We broke that family up.


A moment.


MATT
Do you not understand that?


ANTHONY
It doesn’t matter what I understand, sir.

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Mark Turpin
1997
Hammer
Poems

Maybe he pictured just the nail,

the slight swirl in the center of the head and raised

the hammer, and brought it down with fury and with skill

and sank it with a single blow.

 

Not a difficult truck for a journeyman, no harder

than figuring stairs or a hip-and-valley roof

or staking out a lot, but neither is a house,

a house is just a box fastened with thousands of nails.

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Marwa Helal
2021
Invasive species

By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².

 

It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.

 

I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.

 

In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³

 

I note the absence of the word “Arab.”

 

Still, they do not sense us⁴.

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Marcia Douglas
2023
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread
A Novel in Bass Riddim

A prophet is never recognized in his own country, especially when that country has fallen into the mouths of dragons. Bob waves to a woman in a BMW across the street. It’s his lawyer, Christine. “Is me, Bob!” She closes the tinted windows and weaves through traffic. There was a time when BMW stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers. He thinks of the foolishness of that now.

            He returns to the park, searching for the boy from the night before. He wants to shine his shoes again, to see the light in his eyes from Africa reflected there. In the daylight, the park is different from how he remembered it, but the boy’s tree still leans, and there’s a man selling peanuts and asham.

            “You see the little youth that sleep inna the park?"

            "Which one?"

            “The one with the play-play guitar."

            “Oh, me remember him. Him in juvenile detention! Is a bad youth.”

            “No. Me see him last night.”

            “Him kill a Chinie man in August town. Man-slaughter."

            It doesn’t make sense. Bob has a feeling that he has stepped into the middle of someone’s dream. The fall-down skin itches and there is a dull pain behind his eyes. An idea comes to him.

            “You know Bob Marley?”

            “Yeah?”

            “What if me tell you him come back?”

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Dennis Nurkse
1990
Staggered Lights
Poems

A man and a woman

are lying together

listening to news of a war.

The radio dial

is the only light in the room.

Casualties are read out.

He thinks, “Those are people

I no longer have to love,”

and he touches her hair

and calls her name

but it sounds strange to her

like a stone left over

from a house already built.

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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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