Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Chris Offutt Nonfiction 1996
Dael Orlandersmith Drama 2008
Daniel Orozco Fiction 2011
Ladan Osman Poetry 2021
Nadia Owusu Nonfiction 2019
ZZ Packer Fiction 1999
Ann Pancake Fiction 2003
Suzan-Lori Parks Drama 1992
Elena Passarello Nonfiction 2015
Lydia Peelle Fiction 2010
Janet Peery Fiction 1993
Kathleen Peirce Poetry 1993
Benjamin Percy Fiction 2008
Andrew X. Pham Nonfiction 2000
Rowan Ricardo Phillips Poetry 2013
Xan Forest Phillips Poetry 2021
Tommy Pico Poetry 2018
Claudia Roth Pierpont Nonfiction 1994
Darryl Pinckney Fiction 1986
Darryl Pinckney Nonfiction 1986
Katha Pollitt Nonfiction 1992
Katha Pollitt Poetry 1992
Reinaldo Povod Drama 1987
Padgett Powell Fiction 1986
Stephanie Powell Watts Fiction 2013
Karisma Price Poetry 2025
Brontez Purnell Fiction 2018
Hanna Pylväinen Fiction 2012
Hugh Raffles Nonfiction 2009
Keith Reddin Drama 1992
Spencer Reece Poetry 2005
Roger Reeves Poetry 2015
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts Nonfiction 2012
Mark Richard Fiction 1990
Atsuro Riley Poetry 2012

Selected winners

Kaitlyn Greenidge
2017
We Love You, Charlie Freeman
A Novel

My mother had good hair, a term she would never use herself because, she said, it was so hurtful she couldn’t possibly believe it. But my mother’s hair was undeniably long and thick, a mass of loose curls that Callie and I did not inherit and that she was determined to cut off before we began our new life.

 

She tried to talk both of us into joining her, but only Callie took the bait. My mother got her with the promise of hair made so easy and simple, you could run your fingers through it. When it was all over, Callie was left with an outgrowth of stiff, sodden curls that clung in limp clusters to her forehead and the nape of her neck and made the back of her head smell like burning and sugar.

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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.

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Virginia Grise
2013
blu
A Play

BLU: … i seen pictures, gemini, of oceans that are actually blue. waters so clear you can stand waist deep, look down and see your feet. not like any ocean i’ve ever been to. light reflects off the top of the water and you can see the sand on the ocean floor.

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Alexander Chee
2003
Edinburgh
A Novel

When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always open. Be like a bell, Big Eric would say. But he didn’t know. We weren’t something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

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Joshua Bennett
2021
The Sobbing School
Poems

Please, excuse my shadow. I can’t 

stop leaving. I don’t know how

to name what I don’t know

 

well enough to render

in a single sitting. Every poem

about us seems an impossible labor,

 

like forgetting the face

of the sea, or trying to find

a more perfect name for water.

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Clare Barron
2017
You Got Older
A Play

MAE: I used to have a fantasy where my high school boyfriend Dave Gellatly  – who totally cheated on me and like destroyed all of my self-confidence – would come to my window and knock on my window and then I would let him in and then he would be high on cocaine (even though I’m pretty sure he never did cocaine) and he would like rape me? And the whole time I’m thinking: Maybe I should scream! If I scream, my parents will wake up and come down here and save me and this whole thing will stop. But then if my parents come down here, they’ll see me naked with Dave on top of me. And I’m like a virgin. And super Christian. So I don’t scream. Because I’m too embarrassed. And he rapes me. And then later I decide to report it. And the whole town vilifies me and I’m like this outcast woman? And then Dave dies in a drunk driving accident and everyone is like: If you had just not reported it he would have died anyway and you would’ve gotten justice without having to besmirch his name

 

MAC: That was a fantasy?

 

MAE: I guess I just used to think about it when I needed to cry

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