Search all Winners

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Name Sort descending	Genre	Year
Tobias Wolff	Fiction	1989
John Wray	Fiction	2001
C.D. Wright	Poetry	1989
Stephen Wright	Fiction	1990
Austin Wright	Fiction	1985
Franz Wright	Poetry	1991
Austin Wright	Nonfiction	1985
Lauren Yee	Drama	2019
Javier Zamora	Nonfiction	2024
Ada Zhang	Fiction	2024
Martha Zweig	Poetry	1999

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Selected winners

Elwin Cotman

2025

Weird Black Girls: Stories

Your phone alarm went off at eight. “I only got in a fight one time,” you told me after I told you my dream. “I was playing in the sandbox with my friend and he got mad at me for beating him in a game, so he punched me in the face. My mom took one look at me and said, ‘Never let anyone hit you.’ So she made me go back there and fight him.”

“How’d that go?” I asked.

“I felt bad! We were both crying the whole time. I think I won. I bit him a few times.”

“Sounds excessive.”

“Nuh-uh! When you grow up in poor communities, you have to do violent things to survive. Because if people think they can mess with you, they’ll keep messing with you, and your life will be ten times harder than if you just do unpleasant things. Like bite a boy on the playground. Yeah!” you affirmed with a prim little nod.

Jorie Graham

1985

The Dream of the Unified Field

Selected Poems 1974-1994

There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

By now the talk had changed.

There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.

And x where the mirror had been.

And x where the window had been.

And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.

There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.

Paul Guest

2007

Notes for My Body Double

Poems

…what of the glowing spine,

what of the toy stings of stock footage flames,

what of the jets you swatted dead

from the air with unmistakable joy,

you of the plastic-leather, pebbled Pleistocene flesh,

you of the palsied fury, you

of the put-upon by dissemblers and disturbers,

you, what of the life burned

so cheaply into celluloid we are charmed…

Jericho Brown

2009

Please

Poems

IV. On Graduate School

Grass for acres and trees tall,

Then, everywhere there should be

Some harvest to guard, sprouts

A building in which I am mistaken

For a broom, handled as such,

And given to the floor. To dust.

I am here to learn: that which fears me

Must be crow

In this hall of heavy doors

Where my body is a blemish.

Aria Aber

2020

Hard Damage

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum,
the German word for dream.