Search all Winners

Name Sort descending	Genre	Year
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
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	Nonfiction	1997
Josip Novakovich	Fiction	1997
Sigrid Nunez	Fiction	1993
Dennis Nurkse	Poetry	1990
Antoinette Nwandu	Drama	2018
Geoffrey O'Brien	Nonfiction	1988
Patrick O'Keeffe	Fiction	2006
Chris Offutt	Fiction	1996

Selected winners

Will Arbery

2020

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

A Play

KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying

TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude.

KEVIN
What

TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy.

KEVIN
A pale what

TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.

Sidik Fofana

2023

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

This is the address to the station that be playin the news, she say. Imma write to them and they gonna do a story on us.

I’m like, Yo, Kandese, that’s a good idea.

My mama put on the news every night. I didn’t know you could send them letters.

Ain’t no news cameras comin down here, Bernita say. Cops don’t even come here.

She love rainin on parades.

Geoffrey O'Brien

1988

Dream Time

Chapters From the Sixties

When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.

Elif Batuman

2010

The Possessed

Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“The American girl will judge the leg contest!” they announced. I was still hoping that I had misunderstood them, even as German techno music was turned on and all the boys in the camp, ages eight to fourteen, were paraded out behind a screen that hid their bodies from the waist up; identifying numbers had been pinned to their shorts. I was given a clipboard with a form on which to rate their legs on a scale from one to ten. Gripped by panic, I stared at the clipboard. Nothing in either my life experience or my studies had prepared me to judge an adolescent boys’ leg contest. Finally the English teacher, who appeared to understand my predicament, whispered to me some scores of her own devising, and I wrote them on the form as if I had thought of them myself.

Mindy Aloff

1987

Hippo in a Tutu

Dancing in Disney Animation

Even in a traditional "princess" picture, such as the still-popular 1950 Cinderella, the scene with the most romantic magic—the Fred-and-Ginger buoyancy and sense of brimming anticipation—is not, as we would expect, Cinderella's waltz with the Prince in the ballroom. That we only get to glimpse from behind the courtiers watching it—during those moments when the dance isn't interrupted by comic business for secondary characters or by the couple themselves breaking off the dance merely to drink in each other's shadows. The accent is on their private discovery of their feelings, not on the public celebration of their newfound romance. The real dance energy, rather, surges forth in the designing, cutting, and assembly of the heroine's dress in her lonely bedroom by an exaltation of singing mice and birds: a solitary girl's fantasy. The Disney inspirational artist for Cinderella, as for many animated features of the 1950s, was the brilliant and thoughtful painter Mary Blair. Although Blair was frequently heartbroken by what she viewed as the mistranslation of her concepts in the finished films—a feeling that seems to be embodied in the moment when Cinderella's wicked stepmother and stepsisters tear her dress to shreds—throughout the picture you can still see evidence of Blair's deeply unconventional ideas of how stories can be told through synecdoche (key details made to stand for a larger whole) and emotions represented through color and shifts in proportion.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury

2024

Public Obscenities

A Play

CHOTON

I’m just saying like taxonomically, does it even make sense to categorize my genitalia and your genitalia as the same thing, like…

He indicates RAHEEM’s penis.

…if that’s a penis then…

He pulls his boxers down to show his own penis.

I mean what is this? It’s a polyp.

RAHEEM

Okay.

CHOTON

It’s a little nunu.

RAHEEM

Well I like your little nunu…

RAHEEM examines CHOTON’s penis. He pulls back his foreskin just a bit. CHOTON winces.

CHOTON

Ow. Careful.

RAHEEM

What?

CHOTON

No it’s— it’s just sensitive.

Selected winners