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
Sylvia Moss	Poetry	1988
Thylias Moss	Poetry	1991
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

Rickey Laurentiis

2018

Boy with Thorn

Poems

Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day

is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,

panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,

ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red

hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it

before him like judgment, saying to the mist,

then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what

I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

2025

Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays

The Sade who joins you at the hotel restaurant is not the Sade who gave you all the love she got she gave you more than she could give she gave you love. But she is a Sade who, you realize after a bit of googling, can flex muscles in her leg that most people will never know about and who may be one of the best dancers in the world even though she went to school to be a doctor. She will talk to you about making paintings in Romania while you eat food that tastes like dreams of food.

A waiter whose persona seems to have been inspired by the Steve Martin hamburger scene in the remake of The Pink Panther keeps pouring wine. You win an argument about the name of a jazz biopic even though your sparring partner has spent some SERIOUS time with Wynton Marsalis. By the end of the day you will have heard stories about artists whose names you have searched for in the stacks of many libraries, like one that begins with “Romie called me one morning” and ends with a dick joke the butt of which is, somehow, the New York Times. You fall asleep in a blue room on a mattress that wants your lower back to just go ahead and peace out. But you feel like the number-one luckiest girl in the world.

Downstairs in the dark, Aunt Jemima smiles from the confines of a painting, giving everybody the middle finger.

Mona Simpson

1986

Anywhere But Here

A Novel

At Bob’s Big Boy, one day in the summer, my mother and I pressed together in the phone booth and emptied her purse out on the metal ledge. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, pencils, leaking pens, scuffed makeup tubes, brushes woven with a fabric of lint and hair, a bra, and finally, my mother’s brown leather address book, with the pages falling out. We wanted to call my father in Las Vegas. It was already over a year since we’d flown there. The number was written, carefully, in brown ink.

Stephen Adly Guirgis

2006

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot

A Play

JUDGE LITTLEFIELD: Cunningham, you’re the cynical, faithless spawn of a crackpot gypsy and a defrocked mick—yet, you just told me Jesus would have you on your knees in three minutes.

CUNNINGHAM: So?

JUDGE LITTLEFIELD: So consider this: your friend Judas? He has Jesus for three years. Think about that, Cunningham. Three years in the foxhole with the best friend ya ever had, then he shot him in the back for a pack of Kools. Think what that says about the essential character of the man. Now go home and stir that into your wee gypsy teapot! Petition’s invalid, motion denied! Next case!