Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Samuel Kọ́láwọlé Fiction 2025
Tony Kushner Drama 1990
Natalie Kusz Nonfiction 1989
Suji Kwock Kim Poetry 2006
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
Hilary Leichter Fiction 2026
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

Selected winners

Tyehimba Jess
2006
leadbelly
Poems

Dear Yu Honor

Yu may rmember me when yu visits prison

here I am Walter Boyd Leadbelly #42738

yo best big niger from Sugarland Farm

wit my stella guitar and songs yu like

I play it all like a black machine for yu loud an slow

Down in the valley    What a frend we have in

Jesus an I Sugarland shuffle like pickin cotton far as

eye cn see I need my freedom like yu said yu was gone give me

yur honor all I need a second chance rmembr me

yu sed I was som niger   som niger need they pardon

GOVERNOR

thank yu for yo kind kind hand yo wisdum.

 

Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books. 

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Hansol Jung
2018
Wild Goose Dreams
A Play

​​

CHORUS

-   Search: Husband affair asset division.

-   Askkorealaw dot com Q and A

- Q. My dirty husband is sexing with our daughter’s tutor. Will I get rich if I divorce him or should I make him suffer?

-   A. Make him suffer.

 

MINSUNG

Although, my wife and daughter live in America, I don’t think they’d know if I lit myself on fire,

how will they know that I’m having an affair?

That was a joke.

They call us the goose fathers, I could look that up for you.

 

CHORUS

-   Search: Goose father origin

-   Wikipedia Korea

 

MINSUNG

Aha.

 

CHORUS

-   The goose father is a Korean man who works in Korea while his wife and children stay in an English-speaking country for the sake of the children’s education. / The term is

 

MINSUNG

The term is inspired by the fact that geese migrate, just as the goose dad must travel a great distance to see his family.

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Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
2005
Madeleine Is Sleeping
A Novel

A grotesquely fat woman lives in the farthest corner of the village. Her name is Matilde. When she walks to market, she must gather up her fat just as another woman gathers up her skirts, daintily pinching it between her fingers and hooking it over her wrists. Matilde’s fat moves about her gracefully, sighing and rustling with her every gesture. She walks as if enveloped by a dense storm cloud, from which the real, sylph-like Matilde is waiting to emerge, blinding as a sunbeam.

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Alison C. Rollins
2026
Black Bell

A Child is Like a Clarinet

for Eliza Harris and Henri Akoka

Similes are dangerous.
To equate a person to

an object, an instrument
no less, is a risk.

A child is like a clarinet.
A mother is like a clarinetist.

Personhood posits
promising possibilities.

Poems are willing to die.
Poems dare, just as Eliza

Harris leaped onto pieces
of ice to cross the frozen

Ohio River with her baby
in her hands. Poems flee,

just as Henri Akoka
jumped onto the top of

a moving train with his
clarinet under his arm.

One of these things
is not like the other.

Can’t you tell? Mouthpiece
from lips, flesh from wood.

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Danai Gurira
2012
Eclipsed
A Play

HELENA: You okay?

 

THE GIRL: Jus’ let me sleep, I say I fine, whot number I is?

 

HELENA: Whot number whot?

 

THE GIRL: Whot number wife? He say dere is a rainkin’.

 

HELENA: Ah, ah… number four, you number four.

 

THE GIRL: Whot number is she?

 

HELENA: Tree.

 

THE GIRL: So who Number Two?

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Jaquira Díaz
2020
Ordinary Girls
A Memoir

“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.

       He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.

        She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.

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