Search All Winners

Name Sort descending Genre Year
Harriet Ritvo Nonfiction 1990
José Rivera Drama 1992
Lewis Robinson Fiction 2003
James Robison Fiction 1985
Rick Rofihe Fiction 1991
Carlo Rotella Nonfiction 2007
Jess Row Fiction 2003
Mary Ruefle Poetry 1995
Sarah Ruhl Drama 2003
Michael Ryan Poetry 1987
Russ Rymer Nonfiction 1995
Lucy Sante Nonfiction 1989
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Nonfiction 2010
James Schuyler Poetry 1985
Claire Schwartz Poetry 2022
Salvatore Scibona Fiction 2009
Danzy Senna Fiction 2002
Anton Shammas Fiction 1991
Anton Shammas Nonfiction 1991
Charif Shanahan Poetry 2024
Akhil Sharma Fiction 2001
Lisa Shea Fiction 1993
Julie Sheehan Poetry 2008
Mona Simpson Fiction 1986
Safiya Sinclair Poetry 2016
Jake Skeets Poetry 2020
Aisha Sabatini Sloan Nonfiction 2025
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

Selected winners

Seth Kantner
2005
Ordinary Wolves
A Novel

I remembered the sweet powerful taste of pop. Tommy Feathers had stopped for coffee when he was hunting wolverine. He tossed a bulged red and white can on the chopping block. “You’ll have tat one springtime,” he joked. He was sober; that meant he was laughing and friendly, not frothing about naluagmius starving his family, stealing food out of his children’s mouths. We had sat around waiting for it to thaw. We could have bought pops in Takunak but according to Abe, pop cost money, wasted aluminum, and was bad for our teeth. Nothing for something. Why not drink water? Now Iris was describing the high school friends and fun we’d always worried we missed out on, and I wondered why I hadn’t bought myself a few Cokes.

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Claire Luchette
2025
Agatha of Little Neon: A Novel

We didn’t know much about addiction, about homelessness, but we knew how it could look. We’d watched a man nod into his own lap in the Tim Hortons on Abbott Street, had seen kids hawk lone red and white carnations in plastic sleeves to drivers on the interchange off-ramp. We’d heard the spellbound murmurs of the woman who sat all day at the bus shelter on Fillmore. We offered these people things we thought they’d want. Some days one said yes to a cheeseburger or a Filet-O-Fish or a hot coffee, and other days no one wanted anything but whatever coins and cash we had.

We were many times not helpful at all. One winter, Mary Lucille came across a man asleep next to the grocery carts in the Tops lot. She tapped him on the shoulder and asked, when he roused, if he wanted a ride to the shelter. He shook his head. Or, she said, she could take him to McDonald’s for a chicken sandwich, or fries, or a parfait. 

“A parfait?” the man said. He squinted at her. “What the hell is a parfait?” 

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Anthony Carelli
2015
Carnations
Poems

Kenosha is hideous behind us, cloaked by this cloud that hangs

On the pigeons flushed out:  the last exhalation of the auto assembly. 

We wait at the base of the docks, and talk about the White Sox,

Not the Roman Empire.  My father and I stare right at it, but talk baseball.

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Eduardo C. Corral
2011
Slow Lightning
Poems

I draw the curtains.     The room darkens, but

the mirror still reflects          a crescent moon.

I pull        the crescent out,          a rigid curve

that softens                    into a length of cloth.

I wrap the cloth around                     my eyes,

and I’m peering    through a crack in the wall

revealing                        a landscape of snow.

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Wayne Koestenbaum
1994
The Queen's Throat
Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire

Fear the opera expert, he who knows everything, who puts your humble tastes to shame, who will criticize your recording of Turandot or even your affection for that vulgar opera, the opera queen who only like Monteverdi, the opera queen who doesn’t go to the Met anymore, the opera queen who can’t stand Sutherland, the opera queen who gave me his 1953 Callas Cetra Traviata because he said her voice was fingernails against a chalkboard, the opera queen who disagrees with the maestro’s tempi, the opera queen who hates Wagner or loves only Wagner, the opera queen who doesn’t recognize himself in this description, the opera queen who thinks homosexuality has nothing to do with opera, the opera queen who never has body odor but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, stinks, the opera queen who doesn’t come out to his mother because he says it will hurt her, the opera queen who loves the local production of Barbiere and the opera queen who makes fun of it, the opera queen who isn’t gay but seems gay because he has learned from opera queens how to be a connoisseur: the opera queen whose intense, phobic knowledge is a bludgeon.

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Melanie Sumner
1995
Polite Society
Stories

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.

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