Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Catherine Lacey Fiction 2016
Mary LaChapelle Fiction 1988
Rattawut Lapcharoensap Fiction 2010
Rickey Laurentiis Poetry 2018
Victor LaValle Fiction 2004
Andrea Lawlor Fiction 2020
Amy Leach Nonfiction 2010
Li-Young Lee Poetry 1988
Suzannah Lessard Nonfiction 1995
Dana Levin Poetry 2005
Mark Levine Poetry 1993
Yiyun Li Fiction 2006
Ralph Lombreglia Fiction 1998
Ralph Lombreglia Nonfiction 1998
Layli Long Soldier Poetry 2016
Claire Luchette Fiction 2025
Ling Ma Fiction 2020
Nathaniel Mackey Fiction 1993
Nathaniel Mackey Poetry 1993
Rosemary Mahoney Nonfiction 1994
Terese Marie Mailhot Nonfiction 2019
Megha Majumdar Fiction 2022
Mona Mansour Drama 2012
Micheline A. Marcom Fiction 2006
J.S. Marcus Fiction 1992
Ben Marcus Fiction 1999
Anthony Marra Fiction 2012
Nina Marie Martínez Fiction 2006
Dionisio D. Martínez Poetry 1993
Cate Marvin Poetry 2007
Jesse McCarthy Nonfiction 2022
Shane McCrae Poetry 2011
Tarell Alvin McCraney Drama 2007
Alice McDermott Fiction 1987
Reginald McKnight Fiction 1995

Selected winners

Liza Birkenmeier
2025
Grief Hotel
A Play

WINN – How’s Melba?

EM – She told me she could see the afterlife.

WINN – What’s it like?

EM – Or my afterlife. She said that I would be a few other things when I die, that my cells have tiny souls so when I am a piece of cheese and a pigeon, I will still be me, but my consciousness will be broken down into smaller bits.

WINN – Does that feel happy to you?

EM – I don’t care. I’ll be like a deconstructed sandwich. / Or baby.

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Brian Blanchfield
2016
Proxies
Essays Near Knowing

What you type and submit appears to you attributed to You. What he replies and enters comes from Partner. There is, as it turns out, a lot to say while watching Partner look at you watching. He is, to begin with, in a room of some kind, particular, contingent, “real.” With art and clocks and books and pillows and cigarettes and mail and daylight, or lamplight, with a bed or desk or basement sofa, with doors you can ask him to open, bags he may or may not empty, of content you may deduce about. The bottoms of his socks are dirty. You give it to him that his socks are dirty, that his door is ajar, that his grin is telling. “Partner: Are you for real?”

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Dennis Nurkse
1990
Staggered Lights
Poems

A man and a woman

are lying together

listening to news of a war.

The radio dial

is the only light in the room.

Casualties are read out.

He thinks, “Those are people

I no longer have to love,”

and he touches her hair

and calls her name

but it sounds strange to her

like a stone left over

from a house already built.

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Layli Long Soldier
2016
WHEREAS
Poems

I don't trust nobody

 

             but the land I said

 

I don't mean

 

present company

 

of course

 

you understand the grasses

 

hear me too always

 

present the grasses

 

confident grasses polite

 

command to shhhhh

 

shhh listen

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Raymond Abbott
1985
That Day in Gordon
A Novel

Still behind him was that damn coyote. A determined critter, he was. He hadn’t caught sight of him for at least an hour, but he felt his presence out there. At first he had feared him. Now he didn’t. If circumstances were different he might have welcomed the company of a coyote on a lonely walk on a snowy night. At best, the coyote’s presence was disconcerting. He was puzzled. Why would a coyote be so determined? Poor animal. It had been such a hard winter for man and beast.

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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

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