Search all Winners

Name Sort descending	Genre	Year
Roger Fanning	Poetry	1992
Anderson Ferrell	Fiction	1996
Emil Ferris	Fiction	2025
Kathleen Finneran	Nonfiction	2001
Sidik Fofana	Fiction	2023
Tope Folarin	Fiction	2021
Ben Fountain	Fiction	2007
Carribean Fragoza	Fiction	2023
Jonathan Franzen	Fiction	1988
Kennedy Fraser	Nonfiction	1994
Ian Frazier	Nonfiction	1989
Nell Freudenberger	Fiction	2005
Forrest Gander	Poetry	1997
Cristina García	Fiction	1996
Madeleine George	Drama	2016
David Gewanter	Poetry	2002
Melissa James Gibson	Drama	2002
Dagoberto Gilb	Fiction	1993
Samantha Gillison	Fiction	2000
Aracelis Girmay	Poetry	2015
Jody Gladding	Poetry	1997
Allison Glock	Nonfiction	2004
Molly Gloss	Fiction	1996
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein	Fiction	1991
Elisa Gonzalez	Poetry	2024
Allegra Goodman	Fiction	1991
Jorie Graham	Poetry	1985
Donnetta Lavinia Grays	Drama	2021
Lucy Grealy	Nonfiction	1995
Lucy Grealy	Poetry	1995
Elana Greenfield	Drama	2004
Elana Greenfield	Fiction	2004
Kaitlyn Greenidge	Fiction	2017
Linda Gregg	Poetry	1985
Gordon Grice	Nonfiction	1999

Selected winners

Albert Mobilio

2000

Breathing Room

Breathing Room

There are lives twice as long as others;

they might look back on those

behind them like runners nearing

the finish line relieved

not to have been out of it so early.

We wake one day to an understanding

about our diminishment yet

by evening, we’ve turned that corner—

the present is everything; its tedium

flaring in the window’s reflection.

You get tired of being this way.

Plans go awry & other plans

get made elsewhere, somewhere

elaborately empty. Still, we believe

ourselves slightly beautiful as we check

the door then fill the bedside glass,

means of accumulation mastered,

our complaint well turned.

Unheard behind that window, the night sky—

boundless—still roars.

Shubha Sunder

2025

Optional Practical Training: A Novel

I paused outside Porter Square Station, in my wet clothes, to observe what a sign there called a kinetic sculpture—three elevated red objects shaped like tongues, tumbling about their axes and orbiting a tall white pole. My thoughts circled back to Theta’s shocked expression at my rent, which led me to review my predicted costs—food, transportation, utilities—and wonder if I’d overlooked something. After a brief trance, I descended a long escalator to the commuter rail platform and boarded the train to Wilton. Soon I was passing the same backyards and open spaces I’d sped by in March, no longer barren and covered with dirty snow, but green, with that profusion of young spring leaves I associated with Impressionist paintings. A pond slid into view, its edges blurred by clumps of reeds. The rain started again. It drew long diagonal streaks across the windows. Anyone want to get off at Brandeis? the conductor called as she strode up the aisle. That was a question, she added cheerfully. Not a threat.

Gerald Early

1988

Tuxedo Junction

Essays on American Culture

It is not the primary thrust or purpose of these essays to serve as autobiography. The strictly autobiographical portions are to be approached with caution. This is not to suggest that they are not true, but veracity is hardly the issue or the point. The autobiographical parts often serve the same purpose as notes in a symphony or passage of music: simply to get from one place to another. The personage I am in some of the essays, to borrow Henry Adams’s metaphor, is simply a manikin on which I model some suitable clothes for the occasion… I am a critic and it is best for the reader never to forget that, even if at times I appear to be playing other roles.

Lara Mimosa Montes

2026

The Time of the Novel

When I put in my notice at the bookstore, the manager—a heavy-set woman in her mid-forties who often spoke in monosyllabic bursts—curtly replied, “We’re sorry to see you go.” Whether my employer regretted her inability to create a work environment that might have fostered my personal growth and tempted me to reconsider my options was beyond the scope of my then-nascent narrative powers, but I did not elaborate, as I did not wish to draw out the details surrounding my sudden departure. Outwardly, I feigned regret, but inside, I rejoiced: I was free, I thought, free to take leave of my post and bid my old, monotonous life among books and bookish people goodbye! A more urgent position awaited me in the form of a transparent eye. I shook the manager’s hand, and before the day was done, I updated my email account preferences so that in one week’s time, any work-related queries would receive the following automated response:

HELLO: I AM CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE. I’M CHASING A DREAM CALLED PROSE.

Mindy Aloff

1987

Hippo in a Tutu

Dancing in Disney Animation

Even in a traditional "princess" picture, such as the still-popular 1950 Cinderella, the scene with the most romantic magic—the Fred-and-Ginger buoyancy and sense of brimming anticipation—is not, as we would expect, Cinderella's waltz with the Prince in the ballroom. That we only get to glimpse from behind the courtiers watching it—during those moments when the dance isn't interrupted by comic business for secondary characters or by the couple themselves breaking off the dance merely to drink in each other's shadows. The accent is on their private discovery of their feelings, not on the public celebration of their newfound romance. The real dance energy, rather, surges forth in the designing, cutting, and assembly of the heroine's dress in her lonely bedroom by an exaltation of singing mice and birds: a solitary girl's fantasy. The Disney inspirational artist for Cinderella, as for many animated features of the 1950s, was the brilliant and thoughtful painter Mary Blair. Although Blair was frequently heartbroken by what she viewed as the mistranslation of her concepts in the finished films—a feeling that seems to be embodied in the moment when Cinderella's wicked stepmother and stepsisters tear her dress to shreds—throughout the picture you can still see evidence of Blair's deeply unconventional ideas of how stories can be told through synecdoche (key details made to stand for a larger whole) and emotions represented through color and shifts in proportion.

Linda Kinstler

2023

Come to This Court and Cry

How The Holocaust Ends

She went to school with other Russian-speaking children, some of whom were Latvian Jews, sons and daughters of the lucky few who had been hidden away by righteous gentiles, or who had fought with the famous 43rd Latvian Rifle Guards Battalion of the Soviet army. The others, like her own family, had moved to Riga after the war, their families mostly intact, having spent the war in the eastern evacuation zones.

Some of her schoolteachers were survivors themselves, but no one knew for sure. The survivors, they were silent. They had not yet been glorified, honoured, beatified. They simply went about their lives as best they could. Only decades later did my mother find out that the school principal, Nina Dmitrievna Alieva, was an inmate in Salaspils concentration camp. Only later did she learn of rumours that their strict chorus teacher had climbed out of a ditch in Rumbula.

Selected winners