The Center for Fiction 2025 First Novel Prize was awarded to Darrell Kinsey for his debut novel Natch (Iowa University Press). The award was announced at The Center for Fiction Annual Awards Benefit on December 9, 2025. Joseph Earl Thomas, author of the 2024 First Novel Prize-winning novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, presented Kinsey with the award. Natch was selected by a panel of distinguished judges: Xochitl Gonzalez, Adam Haslett, Tracy O’Neill, and Joseph Earl Thomas.
Inaugurated in 2006, the First Novel Prize honors the best debut novel of the year, and supports important emerging voices in fiction. Each year, the First Novel Prize winner is awarded a $15,000 prize in recognition of their contribution to contemporary literature and in support of their ongoing creative career. Each of the fellow shortlisted authors receives a $1,000 award.
The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize is supported in part by Hawthornden Foundation. To help sustain our work for emerging writers, please consider donating to The Center for Fiction today. For additional support opportunities, please contact Melissa Wyse at [email protected].
2025 First Novel Prize
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Natch
By Darrell Kinsey
Published by University Of Iowa Press
Winner
At the age of twenty-nine, tired of trying to get along with members of his crew and tired of the money going into somebody else’s pocket, Natch begins working for himself, climbing and cutting down trees in the foothills of north Georgia. He has his truck, ropes, climbing gear, and a rotating selection of secondhand saws he finds at pawn shops and flea markets. He is free to work as he pleases. And he believes he is fine with his life as it is, living alone in an old hunting cabin at the end of a dirt lane, enjoying his habits, exploring his vices, and living, as he puts it, “like some wild thing let loose on the world.”
Then he meets Asha, an alluring woman who works the nightshift at a convenience store. He finds himself needing her in a way that he has never needed anyone before. Among her charms are her passions for reading and belly dance and her ambition to put herself through school to become a therapist. She believes her studies will cure her of the familial dysfunctions she faced as a child and eventually enable her to help others.
When Asha discovers that she is expecting a child, the young couple struggles to convert the excitement of their early days together into a more steadfast companionship. Over the seasons of her pregnancy, Asha discovers that the freedom of their hardscrabble existence is overshadowed by the constant threat of misfortune and injury, and she finds herself timorous to bring a child into a setting where chainsaws are everywhere, where constant fires burn the bones of felled trees, a world of endless struggle in which finding more work means finding more danger.
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
By Colwill Brown
Published by Macmillan / Henry Holt and Co.
Shortlisted
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace—the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are. But as they grow up and away from one another, a long-festering secret threatens to rip the trio apart.
Written in a Yorkshire dialect that brings a place and its people magnificently to life, Colwill Brown’s debut novel spans decades as its heroines come of age, never shying from the ugly truths of girlhood. Like Trainspotting and Shuggie Bain, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh tracks hard-edged lives and makes them sing, turning one overlooked and forgotten town into the very center of the world.
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The Devil Three Times
By Rickey Fayne
Published by Hachette Book Group / Little, Brown and Company
Shortlisted
Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde’s mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde’s descendants in their darkest hour of need: Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, who passes for white; Louis and Virgil, who risk becoming a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, who speaks to the dead; James, who struggles to make sense of the past while fighting to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too?
Steeped in the spiritual traditions and oral history of the Black diaspora, The Devil Three Times is a baptism by fire and water, heralding a new voice in American fiction.
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Ibis
By Justin Haynes
Published by Abrams / The Overlook Press
Shortlisted
There is bad luck in New Felicity. The people of the small coastal village have taken in Milagros, an 11-year-old Venezuelan refugee, just as Trinidad’s government has begun cracking down on undocumented migrants—and now an American journalist has come to town asking questions.
New Felicity’s superstitious fishermen fear the worst, certain they’ve brought bad luck on the village by killing a local witch who had herself murdered two villagers the year before. The town has been plagued since her death by alarming visits from her supernatural mother, as well as by a mysterious profusion of scarlet ibis birds.
Skittish that the reporter’s story will bring down the wrath of the ministry of national security, the fishermen take things into their own hands. From there, we go backward and forward in time—from the town’s early days, when it was the site of a sugar plantation, to Milagros’s adulthood as she searches for her mother across the Americas.
In between, through the voices of a chorus of narrators, we glimpse moments from various villagers’ lives, each one setting into motion events that will reverberate outwards across the novel and shape Milagros’s fate.
With kinetic, absorbing language and a powerful sense of voice, Ibis meditates on the bond between mothers and daughters, both highlighting the migrant crisis that troubles the contemporary world and offering a moving exploration of how to square where we come from with who we become.
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Loca
By Alejandro Heredia
Published by Simon & Schuster
Shortlisted
It’s 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he’s held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she’d escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo’s worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.
Loca follows one daring year in the lives of young people living at the edge of their own patience and desires. With expansive grace, it reveals both the grueling conditions that force people to migrate and the possibility of friendship as home when family, nations, and identity groups fall short.
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Liquid
By Mariam Rahmani
Published by Hachette Book Group / Algonquin Books
Shortlisted
The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just “marry rich.”
But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a goal: 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with dating: martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.
Only a tragedy in Tehran and an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator’s increasingly manic trajectory and force her to confront the contradictions of her life in Los Angeles. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she’s been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time.
For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Elif Batuman, Liquid delivers a modern tale of romance, loss, and belonging like no other. Mariam Rahmani’s gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting spin on the classic romantic comedy.
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Optional Practical Training
By Shubha Sunder
Published by Graywolf Press
Shortlisted
Told as a series of conversations, Optional Practical Training follows Pavitra, a young Indian woman who came to the US for college from Bangalore, India, and graduates in 2006 with a degree in physics. Her student visa grants her an extra twelve months in the country for work experience—a period known as Optional Practical Training—so she takes a position as a math and physics teacher at a private high school near Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What Pavitra really wants, though, is the time and space to finish a novel—to diverge from what’s expected of her within her family of white-collar professionals and to build a life as a writer. Navigating her year of OPT—looking for a room to rent, starting her job—she finds that each person she encounters expects something from her too. As her landlord, colleagues, students, parents of her students, friends of her family, and neighbors talk to and at her, they shape her understanding of race, immigration, privilege, and herself.
Throughout the book, Pavitra seems to speak very rarely; and yet, as she responds to the assumptions, insights, projections, and observations of those around her, a subtle and sophisticated portrait emerges of a young woman and aspiring artist defining a place for herself in the world.
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Good Girl
By Aria Aber
Published by Penguin Random House / Hogarth
Longlisted
In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist.
Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of personal and artistic freedom. But as Nila finds herself pulled further into Marlowe’s controlling orbit, ugly, barely submerged racial tensions begin to roil Germany—and Nila’s family and community. After a year of running from her future, Nila stops to ask herself the most important question: Who does she want to be?
A story of love and family, raves and Kafka, staying up all night and surviving the mistakes of youth, Good Girl is the virtuosic debut novel by a celebrated young poet and, now, a major new voice in fiction.
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Crown
By Evanthia Bromiley
Published by Grove Atlantic / Grove Press
Longlisted
Jude Woods is on the brink of eviction. Pregnant, jobless, and mother to Evan and Virginia, she has three days to box up her family’s life and find a safe place to live. In the Woods’ quiet trailer park, neighbors keep to themselves, but it’s no secret Jude and her twins are in jeopardy—the eviction notice slapped on their front door like a white shout.
When Jude’s contractions flare just as their power is shut off, she rushes to the hospital instructing Evan and Virginia to hide in their car in the surrounding fields. If the children are discovered outside alone, they will be taken from her. Jude labors through the night in a crowded emergency room while the twins, desperate in the heat of the cramped car and spurred by their wild imaginations, strike out along the dangerous riverbank in search of a new home for their growing family. As night hurtles toward the morning lockout, both mother and children reckon with what it means to live and dream in a modern America insistent on slamming doors.
Poetic and distinct, the voices of the three Woods open to a chorus of waitresses and oil men, veterans and graffiti artists as Crown trawls the laundromats, public bus systems, and waiting rooms of a forgotten blue-collar city. In this mesmerizing, singular debut, the tenacious spirit of a young family and their community comes to profound and moving life.
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Dominion
By Addie E. Citchens
Published by Macmillan / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Longlisted
Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., shepherd of the Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. He owns the barbershop and the radio station, and generally keeps an iron hand on every aspect of society in Dominion, Mississippi. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. But Wonderboy, his father, and all the structures in place that keep them on top are not as righteous as they seem to be. And when Wonderboy is caught off guard by an encounter with a stranger, he finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined. His response sends shock waves through the entire community.
Priscilla and Diamond, two women who love these men, bear witness to their charms and bear the brunt of their choices. Through their eyes and their stories, Dominion offers an intricate, intimate view of how secrets control us, how shame stifles us, how silence implicates us, and how even love plays a role in the everyday violence and casual sins of the powerful.
A brilliantly crafted Black Southern family drama told with the captivating force, humor, and tenderness carried in the hearts of these women, Addie E. Citchens’s Dominion wrestles with the many brutal, sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy, and studies how we might yet choose to break free.
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Pan
By Michael Clune
Published by Penguin Random House / Penguin Press
Longlisted
Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.
Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of the New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.
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Songs of No Provenance
By Lydi Conklin
Published by Catapult
Longlisted
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she’s forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.
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The Catch
By Yrsa Daley-Ward
Published by W. W. Norton & Company / Liveright Publishing
Longlisted
Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.
As with most things, Clara and Dempsey cannot see eye to eye on the confounding appearance of this woman. Clara, a celebrity author with a penchant for excessive drinking and one-night stands, is all too willing to welcome the confident and temperamental Serene into her home. But cloistered Dempsey, who makes a modest living doing menial data entry work from the confines of her apartment, is dubious of the whole situation, believing this all to be the insidious ruse of a con woman. Clashing over this stranger who burrows deeper and deeper into their lives, the sisters hurtle toward an altercation that threatens their very existence, forcing them to finally confront their pasts—together.
In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”
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This Is the Only Kingdom
By Jaquira Díaz
Published by Hachette Book Group / Algonquin Books
Longlisted
When Maricarmen meets Rey el Cantante, beloved small-time Robin Hood and local musician on the rise, she begins to envision a life beyond the tight-knit community of el Caserío, Puerto Rico – beyond cleaning houses, beyond waiting tables, beyond the constant tug of war between the street hustlers and los camarones. But breaking free proves more difficult than she imagined, and she soon finds herself struggling to make a home for herself, for Rey, his young brother Tito, and eventually, their daughter Nena. Until one fateful day changes everything.
Fifteen years later, Maricarmen and Nena find themselves in the middle of a murder investigation as the community that once rallied to support Rey turns against them. Now Nena, a teenager haunted by loss and betrayal and exploring her sexual identity, must learn to fight for herself and her family in a world not always welcoming. For lovers of the Neapolitan novels, This Is the Only Kingdom is an immersive and moving portrait of a family – and a community – torn apart by generational grief, and a powerful love letter to mothers, daughters, and the barrios that make them.
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The Correspondent
By Virginia Evans
Published by Penguin Random House / Crown
Longlisted
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime. Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.
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If the Dead Belong Here
By Carson Faust
Published by Penguin Random House / Viking
Longlisted
When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.
Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted—both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family—and a people—determined to heal from old wounds.
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Sky Daddy
By Kate Folk
Published by Penguin Random House / Random House
Longlisted
Linda is doing her best to lead a life that would appear normal to the casual observer. Weekdays, she earns $20 an hour moderating comments for a video-sharing platform, then rides the bus home to the windowless garage she rents on the outskirts of San Francisco. But on the last Friday of each month, she indulges her true passion, taking BART to SFO for a round-trip flight to a regional hub. The destination is irrelevant, because each trip means a new date with a handsome stranger—a stranger whose intelligent windscreens, sleek fuselages, and powerful engines make Linda feel a way that no human ever could. . . .
Linda knows that she can’t tell anyone she’s sexually obsessed with planes. Nor can she reveal her belief that it’s her destiny to “marry” one of her suitors, uniting with her soulmate plane for eternity. But when an opportunity arises to hasten her dream of eternal partnership, and the carefully balanced elements of her life begin to spin out of control, she must choose between maintaining the trappings of normalcy and launching herself headlong toward the love she’s always dreamed of.
Both subversive and unexpectedly heartwarming, Sky Daddy hijacks the classic love story, exploring desire, fate, and the longing to be accepted for who we truly are.
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Circular Motion
By Alex Foster
Published by Grove Atlantic / Grove Press
Longlisted
The acceleration of Earth’s spin begins gradually. At first, days are just a few seconds shorter than normal. Awareness of the mysterious phenomenon hasn’t reached Tanner, a young man preoccupied with dreams of escaping his tiny Alaskan hometown. One night, desperate to make his mark on the world, he runs away. He lands an unlikely job at CWC, the operator of a network of massive aircraft that orbit the Earth at 30,000 feet, revolutionizing global transportation. Now goods and people can travel anywhere in little more than an hour—you can visit Paris for an evening or order sushi from Japan. But just as Tanner settles into his new life and begins to consider if his feelings for a male colleague might be more than platonic, CWC is shaken by a wave of social unrest and protest.
That unrest sweeps up Winnie. A high school outcast in an era of street protests, wild parties, and online savagery, Winnie falls in with a group of teen activists who blame CWC for the planet’s acceleration. As days on Earth quicken to twenty-three hours, then twenty, the sun rising and setting ever faster, causing violent storms and political meltdowns, Tanner and Winnie’s stories spiral closer together. They meet cynical executives toiling to forestall the crises they created and religious zealots for whom the apocalypse can’t come soon enough, lobbyists and lovers all coping in their own ways, and Victor Bickle—the self-aggrandizing TV scientist whose shameful secret will bind Tanner and Winnie’s fates . . . if they can uncover it before the Earth spins so fast that even gravity might lose its grip.
Three-hour days. Two-hour days . . .
A propulsive exploration of capitalism, technology, and our place within a system that dwarfs us, Circular Motion is one of the most ingenious debut novels of our time.
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Great Black Hope
By Rob Franklin
Published by Simon & Schuster / Summit Books
Longlisted
An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not.
It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous soul singer, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as lingering questions around how well he really knew his closest friend. He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, only to buckle under the weight of expectations from his family of doctors and lawyers and their history in America. But when Smith returns to New York, it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life—drawn back into the city’s underworld, where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.
Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.
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Mayra
By Nicky Gonzalez
Published by Penguin Random House / Random House
Longlisted
It’s been years since Ingrid has heard from her childhood best friend, Mayra, a fearless rebel who fled their hometown of Hialeah, a Cuban neighborhood just west of Miami, for college in the Northeast. But when Mayra calls out of the blue to invite Ingrid to a weekend getaway at a house in the Everglades, she impulsively accepts.
From the moment Ingrid sets out, danger looms: The directions are difficult, she’s out of reach of cell service, and as she drives deeper into the Everglades, the wet maw of the swamp threatens to swallow her whole. But once Ingrid arrives, Mayra is, in many ways, just as she remembers—with her sharp tongue and effortless, seductive beauty, still thumbing her nose at the world.
Before they can fully settle into the familiar intimacy of each other’s company, their reunion is spoiled by the reemergence of past disagreements and the unexpected presence of Mayra’s new boyfriend, Benji. The trio spend their hours eating lavish meals and exploring the labyrinthine house, which holds as much mystery as the swamp itself. Indoors and on the grounds, time itself seems to expand, and Ingrid begins to lose a sense of the outside world, and herself.
Against this disquieting setting, where lizards dart in and out of porches and alligators peek from dark waters, Gonzalez weaves a surreal, unforgettable story about the dizzying power of early friendship and the lengths we’ll go to earn love and acceptance—even at the risk of losing ourselves entirely.
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The Snares
By Rav Grewal-Kök
Published by Penguin Random House / Random House
Longlisted
In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater than usual powers and fewer than usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination—men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and his moral qualms mount, he is drawn farther and farther away from his wife and two young daughters. When he makes a critical mistake at work, he is left vulnerable to shadowy figures in the intelligence world who seek to use him in their own, still more radical counterterrorism missions. If he agrees, the world of power will open up even wider to him. If he doesn’t . . .
Is Neel an insider or an outsider? The hunter or the hunted? An idealist or a mercenary? What truths, and whose lives, is he willing to sacrifice? The novel plunges readers into the human turmoil behind the faceless operations—the torture, secret assassinations, and drone strikes—of the American security state, creating an eye-opening meditation on morality, violence, and the price of a human soul.
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The Fantasies of Future Things
By Doug Jones
Published by Simon & Schuster
Longlisted
Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta native, has resigned himself to the reality that men who love men don’t have happy endings.
When Jacob meets Sherman, a social worker fighting for one of the families being displaced by the project, he must decide if rejecting security is worth the risk of embracing the unknown. In the midst of navigating his grief, and volatile relationship with Jacob, Daniel learns of his father’s identity. Though meeting his father could provide Daniel with the closure he has always sought, the distance between what Daniel wants and what he’s willing to do for it remains a question only he can answer.
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Sleep
By Honor Jones
Published by Penguin Random House / Riverhead Books
Longlisted
Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.
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Awake in the Floating City
By Susanna Kwan
Published by Penguin Random House / Pantheon Books
Longlisted
Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay.
Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.
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Behind the Waterline
By Kionna Walker LeMalle
Published by Blair
Longlisted
When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to discover secrets to survival, bitter progress, and, ultimately, the history of his own people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.
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Florenzer
By Phil Melanson
Published by W. W. Norton & Company / Liveright Publishing
Longlisted
Leonardo da Vinci, twelve years old and a bastard, leaves the Tuscan countryside to join his father in Florence with dreams of becoming a painter. Francesco Salviati, also a bastard and scorned for his too-dark skin, dedicates himself to the Catholic Church with grand hopes of salvation. Towering above them both is Lorenzo de’ Medici, barely a man, yet soon to be the patriarch of the world’s wealthiest and most influential bank. Each of these young men harbors profound ambition, anxious to prove their potential to their superiors—and to themselves. Each is, in his own way, a son of Florence. Each will, when their paths cross, shed blood on Florence’s streets.
Fifteenth-century Florence flourishes as a haven of breathtaking artistic, cultural, and technological innovation, but discord churns below the surface: the Medici’s bank exacerbates the city’s staggering wealth inequality, and rumors swirl of a rift between Lorenzo and the new pope. Meanwhile, the city has become Europe’s preeminent destination for gay men—or “florenzers,” as they come to be crudely called. For Leonardo, an astonishingly gifted painter’s apprentice, being a florenzer might feel like personal liberation—but risk lingers around every corner.
Brash and breathtaking, this lush historical drama unfolds the machinations of a city on the brink of a new age as it contends with the tensions between public and private lives, the entanglement of erotic and creative impulse, the sacrifices of the determinedly pious, and the risks of fantastic power. With his “unforgettable characters and an ever-twisting plot, all told with style, skill, and wry black humor” (Tim Leach), Phil Melanson emerges as an enthralling new voice in contemporary fiction.
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Work Nights
By Erica Peplin
Published by Simon & Schuster / Gallery Books
Longlisted
Jane Grabowski hauls herself to her nine to five office job at New York City’s most acclaimed newspaper to sit in stale air under severe florescent lights and mask her rage by sending emails with too many exclamation points.
Luckily, Jane has a reason to keep coming into the office: Madeline, the distractingly beautiful intern. Madeline has never dated a woman and is uncomfortable with labels but with carefully timed lunch breaks and painstakingly crafted texts, Jane works her way into her life. Meanwhile, Jane’s free-spirited artist roommate tries to keep her from falling for a straight girl by dragging Jane to gay bars and queer Shabbat dinners, where she meets the decidedly uncool and morally righteous musician, Addy.
Caught between Addy’s readiness to commit and Madeline’s alluring unpredictability, Jane is pulled down a slippery path of lies and deceit, leading to a plane ticket that threatens to take everything down in one fell swoop.
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North Sun
By Ethan Rutherford
Published by Deep Vellum / A Strange Object
Longlisted
Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.
With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well.
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Woodworking
By Emily St. James
Published by Zando / Crooked Media Reads
Longlisted
Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she’s told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn’t exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.
Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She’s also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others’ expectations.
As their unlikely friendship evolves, it comes under the scrutiny of their community. And soon, both women—and those closest to them—are forced to ask: Who are we if we choose to hide ourselves? What happens once we disappear into the woodwork?
Detransition, Baby meets Fleishman is in Trouble in this remarkable debut novel from an incisive contemporary voice. A story about the awkwardness of growing up and the greatest love story of all, that between us and our friends, Woodworking is a tonic for the moment and a celebration of womanhood in all its multifaceted joy.
Meet the Winner, Finalists, and Judges
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Darrell Kinsey
Darrell Kinsey
Winner
Darrell Kinsey has published short fiction in Noon and he won a Pushcart Prize for Fiction XLV. He lives in Watkinsville, Georgia.
Photo Credit: Darrell Kinsey
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Colwill Brown
Colwill Brown
Shortlisted
Colwill Brown was born and raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a James A. Michener Fellowship, and an MA in English literature from Boston College. Her work has appeared in Granta, Prairie Schooner, and other publications and has received scholarships, awards, and support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Hedgebrook, Ragdale, the Anderson Center, GrubStreet Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. For fifteen years she’s lived with ME/CFS, a debilitating neurological disease triggered by a virus that, due to systemic medical neglect, currently has no treatment. A proud Donny lass, she claims to have played bass guitar in (nearly) every rock venue on South Yorkshire’s toilet circuit.
Photo Credit: Kathryn Widdowson
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Rickey Fayne
Rickey Fayne
Shortlisted
Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, the Sewanee Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors’ experiences.
Photo Credit: Shalicia Johnson
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Justin Haynes
Justin Haynes
Shortlisted
Justin Haynes was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, and later moved to Brooklyn, New York. Having earned his MFA from Notre Dame, he continued his graduate studies at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded various fiction residencies and fellowships, including from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. His writing has been published in a variety of literary magazines and journals, including Caribbean Quarterly, SX Salon Small Axe Project, and PREE. Justin lives in Atlanta and teaches English at Oglethorpe University.
Photo Credit: Vera Kutzinski
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Alejandro Heredia
Alejandro Heredia
Shortlisted
Alejandro Heredia is a writer from the Bronx. He has received fellowships from LAMBDA Literary, Dominican Studies Institute, UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College. Loca is his debut novel.
Photo Credit: Demi Vera
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Mariam Rahmani
Mariam Rahmani
Shortlisted
Mariam Rahmani is a writer and translator. Her debut novel Liquid, A Love Story—out this spring with Algonquin in the U.S. and Doubleday in the U.K. — has been lauded in outlets like the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, Vanity Fair, British Vogue, and Foreign Policy, and in interviews with BOMB, Poets & Writers, Image/LA Times, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Her fiction, essays, and translations have appeared in the likes of Granta, Gulf Coast, n+1, New York magazine, and People. Her first translation was well reviewed in the New Yorker and the New York Times. Liquid was named an Oprah Daily Most Anticipated Book of the Year and a March Book of the Month Club Main Pick. It is currently being translated into Italian, Dutch, and Croatian.
Photo Credit: Hadi Salehi
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Shubha Sunder
Shubha Sunder
Shortlisted
Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.
Photo Credit: Chris McIntosh
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Aria Aber
Aria Aber
Longlisted
Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany and now lives in the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and the Whiting Award. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and graduate student at USC, and her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New Republic, the Yale Review, Granta, and elsewhere. Raised speaking Farsi and German, she writes in her third language, English. She recently joined the faculty of the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of Creative Writing and divides her time between Vermont and Brooklyn.
Photo Credit: Nadine Aber
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Evanthia Bromiley
Evanthia Bromiley
Longlisted
Evanthia Bromiley is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of scholarships from the Aspen Institute, a Lighthouse Fellowship, a Lisel Mueller scholarship, and Elizabeth George and Carol Houck-Smith awards. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction can be found in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, and elsewhere. When not writing, she works in impacted schools with young writers and their teachers as they sharpen their craft and voices, telling stories of growing up in the American Southwest. She lives in Durango, Colorado.
Photo Credit: Niki Bryant
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Addie E. Citchens
Addie E. Citchens
Longlisted
Addie E. Citchens was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and lives in New Orleans. A graduate of Jackson State University, she studied in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Oxford American’s “Best of the South,” Midnight & Indigo’s speculative fiction anthology, and other publications. Her blues history work features prominently in Mississippi Folklife, and she has been heard on The Mississippi Arts Hour on Mississippi Public Broadcasting. She was the inaugural recipient of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship, and her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize. Dominion is her first novel.
Photo Credit: Britt Smith
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Michael Clune
Michael Clune
Longlisted
Michael Clune is the critically acclaimed author of the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin. His academic books include A Defense of Judgment, Writing Against Time, and American Literature and the Free Market. Clune’s work has appeared in venues ranging from Harper’s Magazine, Salon, and Granta to Behavioral and Brain Sciences, PMLA, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His work has been recognized by fellowships and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, and others. He is currently a professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University and lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Photo Credit: Lauren Voss
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Lydi Conklin
Lydi Conklin
Longlisted
Lydi Conklin is the author of Rainbow Rainbow, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, and the Paris Review. They’ve drawn comics for the New Yorker, the Believer, Lenny Letter, and other publications.
Photo Credit: Emily April Allen
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Yrsa Daley-Ward
Yrsa Daley-Ward
Longlisted
Yrsa Daley-Ward is a poet, writer, and actress. She is the author of The How, bone, and The Terrible, for which she won the PEN Ackerley Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
Photo Credit: Joshua Michael Shelton
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Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz
Longlisted
Jaquira Díaz was born in Puerto Rico and was raised between Humacao, Fajardo, and Miami Beach. Ordinary Girls: A Memoir was a Whiting Award winner, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal winner, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist, and a finalist for the B&N Discover Prize. The recipient of a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and the Jeanne Córdova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Kenyon Review, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, Díaz has written for the Atlantic, the Guardian, Time magazine, and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. She lives in New York and teaches at Columbia University.
Photo Credit: Sylvie Rosokoff
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Virginia Evans
Virginia Evans
Longlisted
Virginia Evans is from the east coast of the United States. She attended James Madison University for her bachelor’s in English literature, as well as Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, for her master’s of philosophy in creative writing. Now she lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, two children, and her Red Labrador, Brigid.
Photo Credit: Austin Joffe
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Carson Faust
Carson Faust
Longlisted
Carson Faust is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of artist fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, ANMLY, and Waxwing, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. He lives in Minnesota, where he works in philanthropy.
Photo Credit: Jaida Grey Eagle
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Kate Folk
Kate Folk
Longlisted
Kate Folk is the author of the short story collection Out There. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, and Willapa Bay AiR. She lives in San Francisco.
Photo Credit: Andria Lo
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Alex Foster
Alex Foster
Longlisted
Alex Foster received his MFA from New York University, where he served as fiction editor of Washington Square Review. He now edits books at Henry Holt and Company and Metropolitan. His short stories have appeared in Agni, the Common, the Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. Previously, he studied economics at the University of Chicago and conducted research for the U.S. government and for the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab in West Africa. Circular Motion is his first novel.
Photo Credit: Tess Levin
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Rob Franklin
Rob Franklin
Longlisted
Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer Award, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Rumpus among others. Franklin lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts. Great Black Hope is his first novel.
Photo Credit: Emma Trim
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Nicky Gonzalez
Nicky Gonzalez
Longlisted
Nicky Gonzalez is a writer from Hialeah, Florida. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, BOMB, the Kenyon Review, Taco Bell Quarterly, and other publications. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Granum Foundation, Millay Arts, Lighthouse Works, and the Hambidge Center. She lives in Massachusetts.
Photo Credit: Sophie Adams
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Rav Grewal-Kök
Rav Grewal-Kök
Longlisted
Rav Grewal-Kök’s stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, New England Review, the Missouri Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He has won an NEA fellowship in prose and is a fiction editor at Fence. He grew up in Hong Kong and on Vancouver Island and now lives in Los Angeles. The Snares is his first novel.
Photo Credit: Yasmin Grewal-Kök
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Doug Jones
Doug Jones
Longlisted
Douglas E. Jones graduated from Morehouse College and received an MFA from Columbia University. In 2007, he was an inaugural Lambda Literary Fellow at American Jewish University, where he studied with Dorothy Allison. His nonfiction has been included in the anthology Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art and his poetry has been published in Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS. Doug is a full-time, licensed real estate agent in Brooklyn, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. He lives in Atlanta. The Fantasies of Future Things is his debut novel.
Photo Credit: His Images Inc Media
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Honor Jones
Honor Jones
Longlisted
Honor Jones is a senior editor at the Atlantic, and previously at the New York Times. She lives in Brooklyn with her three children.
Photo Credit: Sarra Fleur Abou-El-Haj
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Susanna Kwan
Susanna Kwan
Longlisted
Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Awake in the Floating City is her first novel.
Photo Credit: Andria Lo
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Kionna Walker LeMalle
Kionna Walker LeMalle
Longlisted
Kionna Walker LeMalle crafts stories and poetry from the distinct culture and history of the American South. Her work has appeared in table//FEAST, the Southern Quarterly, the First Line, and the Bayou Review. She earned her MFA at Houston Christian University, where she now teaches in the Department of Narrative Arts. Her debut novel, Behind the Waterline (Blair, 2025), won the Lee Smith Novel Prize, selected by contest judge Deesha Philyaw.
Photo Credit: Michael Tims
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Phil Melanson
Phil Melanson
Longlisted
Phil Melanson is a graduate of New York University and the University of Warwick. A former movie marketer for Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures, he now lectures in film and television for Boston University. He lives in London.
Photo Credit: Jess Rose
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Erica Peplin
Erica Peplin
Longlisted
Erica Peplin is a writer from Detroit, Michigan, now based in Brooklyn. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Joyland, the Millions, McSweeney’s, the Village Voice, and more. From 2015 to 2016, she worked in the advertising department of the New York Times. Since then, she’s worked as a shipping clerk, a high school custodian, and a restaurant server. Her debut novel Work Nights is out now from Gallery Books. Find out more at EricaPeplin.com.
Photo Credit: Carson Baum
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Ethan Rutherford
Ethan Rutherford
Longlisted
Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.
Photo Credit: Lou Russo
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Emily St. James
Emily St. James
Longlisted
Emily St. James is a writer and cultural critic. This is her first novel. Her journalism and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Vox, and the A.V. Club, and her writing for television has been featured on the Emmy-nominated series Yellowjackets. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.
Photo Credit: Eliza Clark
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Xochitl Gonzalez
Xochitl Gonzalez
2025 First Novel Prize Judge
Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last, a Reese’s Book Club Pick longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the award-winning novel Olga Dies Dreaming, named a Best of 2022 by the New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. She is a staff writer for the Atlantic, where she was recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary.
Photo Credit: Allan Zepeda
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Adam Haslett
Adam Haslett
2025 First Novel Prize Judge
Adam Haslett is the author of Mothers and Sons; Imagine Me Gone, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his journalism has appeared in the Financial Times, Esquire, New York magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, among others. He has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Winship Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He currently directs the MFA Program at Hunter College.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
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Tracy O'Neill
Tracy O'Neill
2025 First Novel Prize Judge
Tracy O’Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest. Her novels include The Hopeful and Quotients. She has been named a Civitella Ranieri Fellow, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and is an alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. The Hopeful was longlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. She teaches at Vassar College.
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Joseph Earl Thomas
Joseph Earl Thomas
2025 First Novel Prize Judge
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, winner of The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Paris Review, the Verge, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, the Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program, he also earned his PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Literature, and Video Games at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Photo Credit: Marcus Jackson
