Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Jesse McCarthy Nonfiction 2022
Shane McCrae Poetry 2011
Tarell Alvin McCraney Drama 2007
Alice McDermott Fiction 1987
Reginald McKnight Fiction 1995
John McManus Fiction 2000
James McMichael Poetry 1995
Scott McPherson Drama 1991
Jane Mead Poetry 1992
Suketu Mehta Fiction 1997
Suketu Mehta Nonfiction 1997
Morgan Meis Nonfiction 2013
Ellen Meloy Nonfiction 1997
Michael Meyer Nonfiction 2009
Meg Miroshnik Drama 2012
Albert Mobilio Fiction 2000
Albert Mobilio Poetry 2000
Gothataone Moeng Fiction 2024
Lara Mimosa Montes Fiction 2026
C.E. Morgan Fiction 2013
Wright Morris Fiction 1985
Wright Morris Nonfiction 1985
Thylias Moss Poetry 1991
Sylvia Moss Poetry 1988
Brighde Mullins Drama 2001
Nami Mun Fiction 2009
Manuel Muñoz Fiction 2008
Yannick Murphy Fiction 1990
Yxta Maya Murray Fiction 1999
Lawrence Naumoff Fiction 1990
Nana Nkweti Fiction 2022
Howard Norman Fiction 1985
Bruce Norris Drama 2006
Josip Novakovich Fiction 1997
Josip Novakovich Nonfiction 1997

Selected winners

Cristina Garcia
1996
Dreaming in Cuban
A Novel

“I want to go where it’s cold,” Lourdes told her husband. They began to drive. “Colder,” she said as they passed the low salt marshes of Georgia, as if the word were a whip driving them north. “Colder,” she said through the withered fields of a Carolina winter. “Colder,” she said again in Washington, D.C., despite the cherry-blossom promises, despite the white stone monuments hoarding winter light. “This is cold enough,” she finally said when they reached New York.

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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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Carvell Wallace
2026
Another Word for Love

Once, I read a story—or maybe I imagined a
story—of two children ages eight and twelve
discovering the dead body of the grandmother
who was taking care of them. The older child,
a girl, took responsibility then. Feeding her
younger brother, covering the body, keeping
life going, until the smell got too much, and
they asked a neighbor for help. They were, of
course, rescued. But I often wonder what they
were rescued from. It is good, of course, if
they were brought into a place of safety,
steady reliable meals, home, and hopefully
love and care. But somewhere in me the feeling
of hurtling alone is itself the feeling of
home, a human truth the size of the universe,
the size of my mother and me in a motel with
no future to be certain of. I would never want
that for myself or for my children. I would
never want that for anyone. And yet sometimes,
I want it for myself.

Excerpts from ANOTHER WORD FOR LOVE: A MEMOIR by Carvell Wallace. Copyright © 2024 by Carvell Wallace. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.

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Genya Turovskaya
2020
The Breathing Body of This Thought

but we are still at sea     we climbed into the rocking

boat again     the things that we could not afford

to remember in the vernacular      

 

                                                                       sun

                                                            sinking backwards into the world’s

                                                            light industry    Eros in idle hands

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Elwin Cotman
2025
Weird Black Girls: Stories

Your phone alarm went off at eight. “I only got in a fight one time,” you told me after I told you my dream. “I was playing in the sandbox with my friend and he got mad at me for beating him in a game, so he punched me in the face. My mom took one look at me and said, ‘Never let anyone hit you.’ So she made me go back there and fight him.”

“How’d that go?” I asked.

“I felt bad! We were both crying the whole time. I think I won. I bit him a few times.”

“Sounds excessive.”

“Nuh-uh! When you grow up in poor communities, you have to do violent things to survive. Because if people think they can mess with you, they’ll keep messing with you, and your life will be ten times harder than if you just do unpleasant things. Like bite a boy on the playground. Yeah!” you affirmed with a prim little nod.

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Marwa Helal
2021
Invasive species

By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².

 

It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.

 

I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.

 

In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³

 

I note the absence of the word “Arab.”

 

Still, they do not sense us⁴.

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