Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Denis Johnson Fiction 1986
Taylor Johnson Poetry 2024
Sarah Stewart Johnson Nonfiction 2021
Adam Johnson Fiction 2009
R. Kikuo Johnson Fiction 2023
Jenny Johnson Poetry 2015
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

Selected winners

Safiya Sinclair
2016
Cannibal
Poems

In this wet season my gone mother

climbs back again

 

and everything here smells gutted—

bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom,

 

our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling

this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared

orphans out bleating with the mongrels,

                                    all of us starved

 

for something reclaimable. What chases them,

her barefoot rain, stains my unopened petunia,

shined church shoes, our black words, our hands.

 

I’ll catch the day creep in, her dirt marking my father’s

neck, oil-dreck steeped dark to every collar,

her tar this same fish odor I am washing.

 

I know I am one of them. The emptied.

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Nina Marie Martínez
2006
¡Caramba!
A Novel

Javier was crazy about tacos. He loved them the way some men love their women: a nice, hard, firm shell. While many men have fallen to the wayside on account of a woman, it is hard to imagine a taco unraveling a man the way it did Javier. After simple surgery to remove a cyst from his gallbladder, one of Javier’s friends snuck him a couple of hard-shelled tacos. He propped himself up in his bed, the green of his hospital pajamas matching the lettuce in his taco, smiled wide, and dug in. After a good meal, he thanked the Lord for his many blessings, including such good friends, then laid himself down to sleep never to wake again. The taco shell had ripped his stitches as it went down.

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Aisha Sabatini Sloan
2025
Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays

The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.

A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.

Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.

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Thomas Sayers Ellis
2005
The Maverick Room
Poems

Go Ju go Ju go.

Lightskinned Rainbow

eclipsed Tick Tock,

his chocolate walk-partner.

Incestuous Pootchie and Tan.

Both Frogs. Squirrel. Crazy ass Sponge.

Bama Duke’s lopsided,

sticky daughter, Peaches.

Out b-shaped barber,

Blinky. We miss you,

 

Missy, rest in peace.

John Rocks-on-Rocks.

The Young Dillingers.

Freckles versus Baby Tim.

Cabalou stuttering,

i-m-m-mi-t-ta-ting Johnny Lips.

Hillbilly, Lefty, Itchy and Skip.

Dootie Bug’s first

baby’s mama, leaving.

Tootie had Fin.

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Mary Swander
1994
Heaven-And-Earth House
Poems

We are the nothing-to-lose ones,

the try-anything-once ones,

weed seeds inside our cells –

dandelion, nettle, lizard tail –

roots sunk in, for it is the tips

that count, reaching out to tap

new moisture. Roots, stems, leaves,

the stomata, those little mouths

opening, closing, sucking in air

in the evening when we boil

wild ginger and sleep in its vapor.

Like cures like, we hear in the morning

when we brush ourselves with

vegetable fiber in the shower,

beat ourselves with our fists.

(This is no crazier than anything else.)

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