Search all Winners

Name Sort descending	Genre	Year
Jenny Johnson	Poetry	2015
Taylor Johnson	Poetry	2024
Sarah Stewart Johnson	Nonfiction	2021
Denis Johnson	Fiction	1986
R. Kikuo Johnson	Fiction	2023
Adam Johnson	Fiction	2009
R.S. Jones	Fiction	1992
A. Van Jordan	Poetry	2004
Dan Josefson	Fiction	2015
Rajiv Joseph	Drama	2009
Hansol Jung	Drama	2018
Cynthia Kadohata	Fiction	1991
Agymah Kamau	Fiction	2003
Ilya Kaminsky	Poetry	2005
Joan Naviyuk Kane	Poetry	2009
Seth Kantner	Fiction	2005
Mary Karr	Poetry	1989
Douglas Kearney	Poetry	2008
John Keene	Fiction	2005
John Keene	Poetry	2005
Brigit Pegeen Kelly	Poetry	1996
Randall Kenan	Fiction	1994
Randall Kenan	Nonfiction	1994
Brad Kessler	Fiction	2007
Laleh Khadivi	Fiction	2008
Sylvia Khoury	Drama	2021
Alice Sola Kim	Fiction	2016
James Kimbrell	Poetry	1998
Lily King	Fiction	2000
Linda Kinstler	Nonfiction	2023
Brian Kiteley	Fiction	1996
Matthew Klam	Fiction	2001
Kevin Kling	Drama	1993
Wayne Koestenbaum	Nonfiction	1994
Wayne Koestenbaum	Poetry	1994

2017

Asymmetry

A Novel

So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.

Aria Aber

2020

Hard Damage

To miss my life in Kabul is to tongue
pears laced with needles. I had no life
in Kabul. How, then, can I trust my mind’s long corridor,
its longing for before? I have a faint depression
polluting my heart, sings the lake. That there is music
in everything if you tune into it
devastates me. Even trauma sounds like Traum,
the German word for dream.

A Feather on the Breath of God

A Novel

He could be cruel. I once saw him blow pepper in the cat’s face. He loathed that cat, a surly, untrainable tom found in the street. But he was fond of another creature we took in, an orphaned nestling sparrow. Against expectations, the bird survived and learned to fly. But, afraid that it would not know how to fend for itself outdoors, we decided to keep it. My father sometimes sat by its cage, watching the bird and cooing to it in Chinese. My mother was amused. “You see: He has more to say to that bird than to us!” The emperor and his nightingale, she called them. “The Chinese have always loved their birds.” (What none of us knew: At that very moment in China keeping pet birds had been prohibited as a bourgeois affectation, and sparrows were being exterminated as pests.)

Matthew Stadler

1995

The Sex Offender

A Novel

“Do you masturbate?” he pried.

“Only alone, by myself.” I felt him bristle at my insolence.

“Do you work with appropriate fantasies?”

“Work?”

“You know, do you masturbate to appropriate fantasies before indulging in your inappropriate ones?” He’d given me very specific instructions about this. He scolded my silence by scooting his chair forward till I could smell the odor of his leg.

“Sometimes. Sometimes I forget.”