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

Albert Mobilio
2000
The Geographics
Poems

no one wants to admit it but you just

might end up one day in the wrong

place at the wrong time and some

evil shit rains down on you

and maybe you get

crippled or blind

or plain old

dead and

not one soul will give a good goddamn

because they can soothe them-

selves with a wrung out prayer

about wrong places and

wrong times, when

even as they’re

thinking that

they know

that everywhere is the wrong place

and every hour is the wrong hour

and that bad breaks don’t seek

you out; they’re always there

waiting to swing into action

like a traitor limb you

didn’t even know

you had

Read More >
Emily Hiestand
1990
Green the Witch-Hazel Wood
Poems

The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,

the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.

This is like that, that is like this, oh,

let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:

nothing is like anything else.

Even the parrot and the apish ape

mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.

To begin:  algae, abalone, alewife —

each the spitting image of itself.

Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)

Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,

nothing is more original than a bog,

more rare than the cougar and crane —

save all the above named.

 

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,

deer, the descent of man and estuaries,

flakes of snow (no two like) fire,

flax, gannets and gulls.

Honeybees and the Hoover Dam

are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.

Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,

joshua trees, lagoons and the law

that to liken a lichen is tautological.

Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds

that all of these are idiosyncracies:

the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.

 

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —

not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.

This is the world of plenitude and power —

every bit of it out of this world:

 

the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.

As now we inch toward an end — vectors

and a winter that figures to be like no other,

say the selfsame earth is to your liking,

and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,

all things like, beyond compare.

Read More >
Micheline A. Marcom
2006
The Mirror in the Well
A Novel

And she then imagines that she sees the flock today because today she is feeling forlorn and abandoned, like a small girl, and doubting and the birds are on a long journey, the journey perhaps of their southern flight for the winter and she also would like to travel, would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit, and it is only her lover, this carpenter in a Californian city, who had undone the right bands, who has leaked her soul out onto air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.

Read More >
Mona Mansour
2012
Humana Festival 2012
The Complete Plays

BEDER: (fuming) Independence Day fireworks. How can the Israelis call it Independence Day and not choke on the words? They celebrate forcibly removing people from their homes? Killing men, women, children? This is cause for a party?

 

ADHAM: Let’s not get political.

 

BEDER: Who’s getting political?

Read More >
Alice McDermott
1987
That Night
A Novel

It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones.

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Mark Cox
1987
Barbells of the Gods
Poems

Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you

in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look

for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.

Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that

we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened

between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let

the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,

to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to

make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth

and yell across the lawns to her.

Read More >