Search all Winners

Name Sort descending	Genre	Year
Justin Cronin	Fiction	2002
Stanley Crouch	Nonfiction	1991
Michael Cunningham	Fiction	1995
Charles D'Ambrosio	Fiction	2006
Michael Dahlie	Fiction	2010
J. D. Daniels	Nonfiction	2016
Nathan Alan Davis	Drama	2018
Lydia Davis	Fiction	1988
Tyree Daye	Poetry	2019
Connie Deanovich	Poetry	1997
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams	Fiction	2013
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams	Nonfiction	2013
Hernan Diaz	Fiction	2019
Jaquira Díaz	Nonfiction	2020
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs	Poetry	2016
Trudy Dittmar	Nonfiction	2003
Matt Donovan	Poetry	2010
Mark Doty	Poetry	1994
Marcia Douglas	Fiction	2023
Jennifer duBois	Fiction	2013
Bruce Duffy	Fiction	1988
Steven Dunn	Fiction	2021
Anaïs Duplan	Nonfiction	2022
Pam Durban	Fiction	1987
Stuart Dybek	Fiction	1985
Gerald Early	Nonfiction	1988
Russell Edson	Poetry	1989
Kim Edwards	Fiction	2002
Louis Edwards	Fiction	1994
Erik Ehn	Drama	1997
Gretel Ehrlich	Nonfiction	1987
Nancy Eimers	Poetry	1998
Deborah Eisenberg	Fiction	1987
Thomas Sayers Ellis	Poetry	2005
Jeffrey Eugenides	Fiction	1993

Selected winners

Melanie Rae Thon

1997

First, Body

Stories

There’s a man inside this woman, and he’s alive. But he can’t speak—she can’t speak—the face is peeled back, the skull empty, and now the cap of bone is being plastered back in place, and now the skin is being stitched shut. The autopsy is over—she’s closed, she’s done—and he’s still in there, with her, in another country, with the smell of shit and blood that’s never going to go away, and he’s not himself at all, he’s her, he’s Gloria Luby—bloated, full of gas, fat and white and dead forever.

Franz Wright

1991

Entry in an Unknown Hand

Poems

The street deserted. Nobody,

only you and one last

dirt colored robin,

fastened to its branch

against the wind. It seems

you have arrived

late, the city unfamiliar,

the address lost.

And you made such a serious effort –

pondered the obstacles deeply,

tried to be your own critic.

Yet no one came to listen.

Maybe they came, and then left.

After you traveled so far,

just to be there.

It was a failure, that is what they will say.

Justin Cronin

2002

Mary and O'Neil

A Novel in Stories

Later, when O’Neil imagines the accident—in the days and weeks that follow, and then for years to come—he imagines that it occurs in silence, and that his parents’ eyes are closed. Their eyes are closed like children asleep in a car at night, their faces and bodies in perfect, trusting repose, his father at the wheel, his mother beside him, and though it makes no sense to think it, he sees them holding hands—as O’Neil will one day hold his daughter’s hand when a nightmare has awakened her, to tell her that he is there beside her, that in sleep we have nothing to fear.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

2025

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays

The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.

A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.

Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.

Nina Marie Martínez

2006

¡Caramba!

A Novel

Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.

Elaine Castillo

2026

Moderation, A Novel

Girlie was, by every conceivable metric, one
of the very best. All the chaff, long ago
burned up by unquenchable fire: the ones who
had hourly panic attacks, the ones who took
up drinking; the ones who fucked in the
stairwells during break time, the ones who
started bringing handguns to the office, the
ones who started believing the Holocaust had
never happened, or that 9/11 was an inside
job, or that no one had ever been to the
moon at all, or that every presidential
candidate was picked by a cosmic society of
devils who communicated across
interplanetary channels; the ones who took
the work home, the ones who never came back
the same, or never came back at all. The
floor was now averaging only three or four
suicide attempts a year, down from one or
two a month. The ones who remained, like
her, were the wheat: the exemplars, tested
paladins, the ones who didn’t throw up in
the hallway and leave the vomit there.
They’d been, to continue speaking of it
biblically, separated.

From MODERATION by Elaine Castillo, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.

Selected winners