Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Virginia Grise Drama 2013
Rinne Groff Drama 2005
Paul Guest Poetry 2007
Stephen Adly Guirgis Drama 2006
Alexis Pauline Gumbs Nonfiction 2022
Danai Gurira Drama 2012
Daniel Hall Poetry 1998
Lisa Halliday Fiction 2017
W. David Hancock Drama 1998
Karen Hao Nonfiction 2026
Kent Haruf Fiction 1986
Michael Haskell Poetry 1999
Ehud Havazelet Fiction 1999
Terrance Hayes Poetry 1999
Alan Heathcock Fiction 2012
Marwa Helal Poetry 2021
Amy Herzog Drama 2011
Emily Hiestand Poetry 1990
Rick Hilles Poetry 2008
Lucas Hnath Drama 2015
Eva Hoffman Nonfiction 1992
Donovan Hohn Nonfiction 2008
John Holman Fiction 1991
Mary Hood Fiction 1994
Jay Hopler Poetry 2009
Michelle Huneven Fiction 2002
Samuel Hunter Drama 2012
Hajar Hussaini Poetry 2026
Ishion Hutchinson Poetry 2013
Naomi Iizuka Drama 1999
James Ijames Drama 2017
Major Jackson Poetry 2003
Michael R. Jackson Drama 2019
Mitchell S. Jackson Fiction 2016
Tyehimba Jess Poetry 2006

Selected winners

Ralph Lombreglia
1998
Make Me Work
Stories

The statue’s resting place looked pretty good. All she really had to do was get him deep enough so the dogs didn’t dig him up before the sale. After her exertions over his tomb, the hollow Saint Joseph seemed to weigh nothing in her hand. He seemed to float in space before her eyes. She set him down on his back in the hole, but found that she couldn’t shovel the dirt on top of him, not right on his face like that. She turned him face-down, but that seemed worse. When she picked him up again, half-frozen dirt had sifted into his open base. You could see it through the translucent, cream-colored skin: Saint Joseph turning brown as he filled up with soil.

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Joan Chase
1987
During the Reign of the Queen of Persia
A Novel

For as long as we could remember we had been together in the house which established the center of the known world. When we were younger we woke in the mornings while it was still dark. Grandad would be clumping out of his back room and down the hall to the bathroom, phantom-like in his long underwear. He wore it because he was a farmer, which was why he got up before first light to do the chores. In the two iron beds in the attic room there were the four of us—Celia and Jenny, who were sisters, Anne and Katie, sisters too, like our mothers, who were sisters. Sometimes we watched each other, knew differences. But most of the time it was as though the four of us were one and we lived in days that gathered into one stream of time, undifferentiated and communal.

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James Ijames
2017
WHITE
A Play

VANESSA: Have you ever met a black woman…you know…in like, real life that talks like that?

 

GUS: I’m sure I have.

 

VANESSA: I see.

 

GUS: That’s why I think this matters so much. My work is really interrogating my own interiority. But having you present my work, I’m being more true to myself by exposing my inner self through you. Creating a real life version of …the black woman inside me. To be enjoyed by all. I want her voice to be heard. I want to create her with you.

 

VANESSA: Oh my god. I just read an article about this in The Atlantic. What did they call it? Uhph—Racial Tourism! That’s it!

 

GUS: That’s a new one.

 

VANESSA: No it’s like…“Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce. They can teach me fun comebacks and how to wag my finger and I can be just as fierce and fabulous as them, but without the burden of actually being a black girl.” I got that right?

 

GUS: Whoa…You don’t know me.

 

VANESSA: I don’t.

 

GUS: I’m not a racist.

 

VANESSA: This is really awkward for you.

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Anaïs Duplan
2022
Blackspace
On the Poetics of an Afrofuture

Adrian Piper took photos of her naked body while reading The Critique of Pure Reason to make sure her body was still there. I don’t want to talk about “the black body.” Where is such a thing? I am not inside of anything. I want the monad. I want integration, but not the kind that requires “white” and “black” to participate. Integration as the move from a dualist Cartesian world to the monist’s world, so that transcendence is a misnomer—there being nothing to get beyond, to get above or around. In this single world-substance, everywhere is home; everything is forever; and everyone is inalienable.

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Diannely Antigua
2020
Ugly Music

The last time I cried to your picture

was the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.

It was about her and you and how

all the things I could touch would disappear,

like your hand or dirty boxers on the floor,

or the liver spots on her arms, the space

of her missing tooth.

 

I’ve been having that dream again.

The one where I make a fortune selling my used underwear 

and I buy her a tombstone. 

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Marcia Douglas
2023
The Marvellous Equations of the Dread
A Novel in Bass Riddim

A prophet is never recognized in his own country, especially when that country has fallen into the mouths of dragons. Bob waves to a woman in a BMW across the street. It’s his lawyer, Christine. “Is me, Bob!” She closes the tinted windows and weaves through traffic. There was a time when BMW stood for Bob Marley and the Wailers. He thinks of the foolishness of that now.

            He returns to the park, searching for the boy from the night before. He wants to shine his shoes again, to see the light in his eyes from Africa reflected there. In the daylight, the park is different from how he remembered it, but the boy’s tree still leans, and there’s a man selling peanuts and asham.

            “You see the little youth that sleep inna the park?"

            "Which one?"

            “The one with the play-play guitar."

            “Oh, me remember him. Him in juvenile detention! Is a bad youth.”

            “No. Me see him last night.”

            “Him kill a Chinie man in August town. Man-slaughter."

            It doesn’t make sense. Bob has a feeling that he has stepped into the middle of someone’s dream. The fall-down skin itches and there is a dull pain behind his eyes. An idea comes to him.

            “You know Bob Marley?”

            “Yeah?”

            “What if me tell you him come back?”

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