Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Joshua Weiner Poetry 2002
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
Austin Wright Fiction 1985
Franz Wright Poetry 1991
Austin Wright Nonfiction 1985
C.D. Wright Poetry 1989
Stephen Wright Fiction 1990
Lauren Yee Drama 2019
Javier Zamora Nonfiction 2024
Ada Zhang Fiction 2024
Martha Zweig Poetry 1999

Selected winners

Yxta Maya Murray
1999
Locas
A Novel

Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”

 

LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.

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Ocean Vuong
2016
Night Sky in Exit Wound
Poems

 

A military truck speeds through the intersection, children

                                     shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

          through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                     lies panting in the road. Its hind legs

                                                                         crushed into the shine

                                            of a white Christmas.

 

On the bedstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                   for the first time.

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Milo Wippermann
2023
Joan of Arkansas

Last year, Simone had been voted “Most Christ-Like” of the Domremy Catholic High School Freshman Class. 
            Privately, she hoped that she did have God’s grace to thank for her ease in the world. Something about grace, even though one need not do anything to receive it, denoted heroism. It was heroism in the sense of being singled out and chosen—an idea that accounted for and made tolerable the ways in which Simone felt entirely alone.
            Nothing, she knew, had been easy for Joan—nothing except talking to God. “If you want God to talk to you, you have to be silent,” Simone knew from one of Joan’s videos. She had attempted silence in every form she could fathom but even her attempts felt loud. How to empty herself of her self, she wondered.

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Tommy Pico
2018
Nature Poem

My family’s experience isn’t fodder

for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

 

But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

 

Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

 

Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

 

Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

I mean tribal leaders

 

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

 

I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

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Melanie Sumner
1995
Polite Society
Stories

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

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Jenny Johnson
2015
The Best American Poetry 2012

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

A nightingale is recorded in a field

where finally we meet to touch and sleep.

A nightingale attests

as bombers buzz and whir

overhead enroute to raid.

We meet undercover of brush and dust.

We meet to revise what we heard.

The year I can’t tell you. The past restages

the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.

But the coded trill a fever ascending,

a Markov chain, discrete equation,

generative pulse, sweet arrest,

bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

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