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Name Sort descending	Genre	Year
Taylor Johnson	Poetry	2024
Denis Johnson	Fiction	1986
Adam Johnson	Fiction	2009
Sarah Stewart Johnson	Nonfiction	2021
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	Poetry	2005
John Keene	Fiction	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

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Selected winners

Harriet Ritvo

1990

The Animal Estate

The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England

When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.

Colson Whitehead

2000

The Intuitionist

A Novel

“You aren’t one of those voodoo inspectors, are you? Don’t need to see anything, you just feel it, right? I heard Jimmy make jokes about you witch doctors.”

She says, “Intuitionist.” Lila Mae rubs the ballpoint of the pen to get the ink flowing. The W of her initials belongs to a ghost alphabet.

The super grins. “If that’s the game you want to play,” he says, “I guess you got me on the ropes.” There are three twenty-dollar bills in his oily palm. He leans over to Lila Mae and places the money in her breast pocket. Pats it down. “I haven’t ever seen a woman elevator inspector before, let alone a colored one, but I guess they teach you all the same tricks.”

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.

Trudy Dittmar

2003

Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky

Brushes with Nature's Wisdom

In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press