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

Aaliyah Bilal
2024
Temple Folk: Stories

The hotel staff placed a pitcher of water on each table next to a small stack of translucent cups. I couldn’t help but shake my head at that. We would have been better off, I figured, taking Imam Saleem’s suggestion and just staying put at the Temple. The kitchen sisters would have at least given us some fruit punch and sugar cookies. Hell, had we asked nice enough, they might have made us some fried chicken and potato salad. If we were trying to throw money around like Rockefellers, why not put it in the building fund or pay zakat? But I was a one-man HVAC operation, with little more than a truck, some tools, and a house I was just three mortgage payments away from owning outright. As far as those brothers were concerned, I was too ordinary, based on outward appearances, to be an example.

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Frank Stewart
1986
Flying the Red Eye
Poems

Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.

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Anthony Walton
1998
Mississippi
An American Journey

One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

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Karen Hao
2026
Empire of AI

Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor
that encapsulates the nature of what these AI
power players are: empires. During the long
era of European colonialism, empires seized
and extracted resources that were not their
own and exploited the labor of the people
they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and
refine those resources for the empire’s
enrichment. They projected racist,
dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority
and modernity to justify—and even entice the
conquered into accepting—the invasion of
sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation.
They justified their quest for power by the
need to compete with other empires: In an
arms race, all bets are off. All this
ultimately served to entrench each empire’s
power and to drive its expansion and
progress. In the simplest terms, empires
amassed extraordinary riches across space and
time, through imposing a colonial world
order, at great expense to everyone else.
 

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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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Will Arbery
2020
Heroes of the Fourth Turning
A Play

KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying
 
TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude. 
 
KEVIN
What
 
TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy. 
 
KEVIN
A pale what
 
TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.
 

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