Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Mona Simpson Fiction 1986
Safiya Sinclair Poetry 2016
Jake Skeets Poetry 2020
Genevieve Sly Crane Fiction 2020
Evan Smith Drama 2002
Tracy K. Smith Poetry 2005
Dalia Sofer Fiction 2007
Jason Sommer Poetry 2001
Elizabeth Spires Poetry 1996
Jane Springer Poetry 2010
Matthew Stadler Fiction 1995
James Thomas Stevens Poetry 2000
Frank Stewart Poetry 1986
Ruth Stone Poetry 1986
Patricia Storace Nonfiction, Poetry 1996
Kelly Stuart Drama 2000
John Jeremiah Sullivan Nonfiction 2004
Melanie Sumner Fiction 1995
Mary Swander Nonfiction, Poetry 1994
Stephania Taladrid Nonfiction 2023
Margaret Talbot Nonfiction 1999
Lysley Tenorio Fiction 2008
LB Thompson Poetry 2010
Clifford Thompson Nonfiction 2013
Nafissa Thompson-Spires Fiction 2019
Melanie Rae Thon Fiction 1997
Merritt Tierce Fiction 2019
Christopher Tilghman Fiction 1990
Jia Tolentino Nonfiction 2020
Peter Trachtenberg Nonfiction 2007
Vu Tran Fiction 2009
Judy Troy Fiction 1996
Tony Tulathimutte Fiction 2017
Jack Turner Nonfiction 2007
Genya Turovskaya Poetry 2020

Selected winners

Andrea Lawlor
2020
Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
A Novel

The game consisted of a single question: If you had to fall in love with (by which Paul meant have sex with) one person in this elevator, who would it be? He played the elevator game in every class he ever took, on the bus, in straight bars, in subway cars, in waiting rooms, free clinics, the line at a movie theater, dinner out with a group of friends-of-friends. He sometimes played the elevator game with Jane, a silent communion of eyebrows and squints or—more likely—a fast-talking, low-murmured loop around the bar, marking targets. Jane was his favorite companion for this; she didn’t judge. Most of his life he had played alone.

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Tracy K. Smith
2005
Life on Mars
Poems

Some of the prisoners were strung like beef

From the ceilings of their cells. “Gus”

Was led around on a leash. I mean dragged.

Others were ridden like mules. The guards

Were under a tremendous amount of pleasure.

I mean pressure. Pretty disgusting. Not

What you’d expect from Americans.

Just kidding. I’m only talking about people

Having a good time, blowing off steam.

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Xan Phillips
2021
HULL

Though I cannot lavish praise on stamina
            alone, I must acknowledge a femme

            

            fortitude. Last night, I tell myself,
a misstep at battery’s expense

 

so as to never consider the sentience
of a pleasure machine.

 

How her trembling must have lullabied
                   my drunk tongue the intricacies

                  

                   of sexual decorum even in sleep,
how she may have throbbed

 

all night beside me, anticipating her
own reciprocal and tender invasion.

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Christopher Cokinos
2003
Hope Is the Thing with Feathers
A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds

In a volume of his American Ornithology, pioneering naturalist Alexander Wilson described a flock of Passenger Pigeons that he had witnessed in the early 1800s as the birds flew between Kentucky and Indiana. The flock, Wilson estimated, numbered 2,230,272,000 birds. “An almost inconceivable multitude,” he wrote, “and yet probably far below the actual amount.” The multitude spanned a mile wide and extended for some 240 miles, consisting of no fewer than three pigeons per cubic yard of sky… if Wilson’s flock had flown beak to tail in a single file the birds would have stretched around the earth’s equatorial circumference 22.6 times… With their powerful chests and long, quick-snapping wings, the pigeons flew an average of 60 miles per hour for hours at a time. Sometimes the swift and seemingly endless flocks stretched across the entire dome of sky, so that wherever one looked, horizon or zenith or somewhere between, there flew the pigeons.  They closed over the sky like an eyelid.

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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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Weike Wang
2018
Chemistry
A Novel

Two marriages:

            Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.

            Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.

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