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
Michael R. Jackson Drama 2019
Mitchell S. Jackson Fiction 2016
Major Jackson Poetry 2003
Tyehimba Jess Poetry 2006

Selected winners

Esmé Weijun Wang
2018
The Collected Schizophrenias

You are told when to sleep and when to wake up. If you spend too much time in your bedroom, it indicates that you’re being antisocial; if you do sit in the common areas, but don’t interact with the other patients, you’re probably depressed or overly inward or perhaps even catatonic. Humans might all be ciphers to one another, but people with mental illness are particularly opaque because of our broken brains; we cannot be trusted about anything, including our own experiences.

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Jane Springer
2010
Dear Blackbird,
Poems

Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon

in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon

slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth

while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &

Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.

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Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
2024
Snow in Midsummer
A Play

DOU YI

My hands were packed in dry ice

Flown across the Pacific and

Stitched onto a man who lost his overseas.

My palms open doors to

Rooms my feet haven't walked through and

Caress a woman my eyes will never see.

It doesn't snow there but my

Nails ache when they touch ice and

Scratch strange characters onto that

Soldier's skin while he's sleeping.

His doctors call it post-traumatic stress but

He knows they're words from a

Language his tongue never learned

Justice. 

Justice. 

Justice

Across the East Sea a yam farmer

Uses my corneas to see.

She dreams of snow but thinks

It's ashes from a childhood fire bombing.

On the far side of the Atlantic my stomach digests

Food that never passed through my lips

Food my teeth didn't chew

Food my tongue hasn't tasted

Food that could have made this spirit stronger

And act sooner if someone offered it to Dou Yi.

But my heart--

My heart beats in this town,

Pumping blood through a man

Loved by the son of an official,

A son who moved Heaven and Earth for

His Happiness.

His Future.

His New Harmony.

These offerings have given me strength

I feel my spirit reviving!

Justice. 

Justice. 

Justice.

Justice and burial for the widow Dou Yi

Justice.

Justice.

Justice.

But how can you bury a woman whose butchered body's still living?

Justice. 

Justice.

That is my heart. It should beat inside me.

 

(Dou Yi thrusts her hand into Rocket's chest and retrieves her heart.)

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Ada Zhang
2024
The Sorrows of Others: Stories

Prancing down the building’s stairs, Hui concentrated again on the boy who had stopped returning her calls. Acknowledging another’s pain obscured one’s own. Hui wasn’t ready yet to accept that. From the window, Meng watched her granddaughter walk up the tree-lined street. The old woman’s longing was like that of a child, featuring prominently in her eyes, which captured that spirit from her youth. It would have been easy for anyone to picture what she had looked like back then, if anyone had been there.

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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.

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Jenny Johnson
2015
The Best American Poetry 2012

A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.

A nightingale is recorded in a field

where finally we meet to touch and sleep.

A nightingale attests

as bombers buzz and whir

overhead enroute to raid.

We meet undercover of brush and dust.

We meet to revise what we heard.

The year I can’t tell you. The past restages

the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.

But the coded trill a fever ascending,

a Markov chain, discrete equation,

generative pulse, sweet arrest,

bronchial junction, harmonic jam.

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