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
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
Martha Zweig Poetry 1999

Selected winners

Dionisio D. Martinez
1993
Bad Alchemy
Poems

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

 

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

 

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

 

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

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Brigit Pegeen Kelly
1996
Song
Poems

                My mother

gathers gladiolas. The gladness

is fractured. As when

the globe with its thousand mirrors

cracked the light. How

it hoarded sight: all the stolen perspectives

and the show of light

they shot around us: so that

down the dark hall the ghosts danced

with us: down the dark hall

the broken angels.

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Andre Aciman
1995
Out of Egypt
A Memoir

People in the street referred to her as al-tarsha, the deaf woman, and, among the Arabs in the marketplace, everyone and everything in her household was known in elation to the tarsha: the deaf woman’s father, the deaf woman’s home, her maid, her bicycle, her car, her husband. The motorcycle with which she had won an exhibition race on the Corniche in the early forties and which was later sold to a neighbor continued to be known as the tarsha’s mutusikl. When I was old enough to walk alone on the streets of Ibrahimieh, I discovered that I too was known as the tarsha’s son.

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Anton Shammas
1991
Arabesques
A Novel

The intimate places of his father’s body were now within his reach, turned over to the touch of his fingers: his father who had never embraced him as a child. First he would touch his earlobes, to move them out of the way for the scissors, which had been taken out of the mother-of-pearl damascene box. Then he would take the nose between his thumb and forefinger, and give it a slight lift so as to shave above the upper lip. And the more the cancer gnawed away at the liver and the body grew limp, the more it opened to him, replete with its disappointments, sated with its tribulations. They would sit together in silence, the father and he, the youngest of his sons.

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Linda Gregg
1985
Too Bright to See / Alma
Poems

She walks all the time in the Heart Ward.

She makes no sound. She is always alone.

If she is looking in the toilet stall and you come in

she leaves. She calls you Dear.

I was thinking of giving her my flowers.

Just now she came over and said,

‘You don’t have to be writing all the time Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you have any flowers?’

She said, ‘No Dear.’

I said, ‘Do you want any flowers?’

She said, ‘No, no flowers, Dear.’

I said, ‘Don’t you want any flowers at all?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s too late for flowers Dear.’

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