photo credit: David Manak
2026 Recipient: Erika Krouse
Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, including her new collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, which was longlisted for The Story Prize. Erika is a two-time winner of the Edgar Award, and her memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice.
Erika is also a winner of the Colorado Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award, and the Paterson Fiction Prize. Erika’s short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire.com, Best Mystery Stories of the Year, The Best American Mystery and Suspense, and elsewhere. Erika mentors for the Book Project and the Portfolio Year at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.
Read the 2026 Prize Announcement press release.
“I can’t express how honored (and astonished) I feel. Thank you to New Literary Project, Joyce Carol Oates, the judges and jurors, Joe Di Prisco, Diane Del Signore, the Project Board, UC Berkeley English Department, Saint Mary’s College MFA, and NewLit supporters and staff. I’m awestruck by fellow finalists Katie Kitamura, Lori Ostlund, Jamie Quatro, and Danzy Senna, as well as the longlisted writers for this award. Thank you to everyone at Flatiron Books, with extra gratitude for my genius editor, Caroline Bleeke, and PR wizard Claire McLaughlin. I’ve long treasured the wisdom and encouragement of my agent, Mary Evans. I’m grateful to Andrea Dupree and Mike Henry at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, my colleagues and fellow writers, my clients and inspiring students, and Ellen Levy, who encouraged me to submit to this prize. Save Me, Stranger wouldn’t exist without the Murphistas’ invaluable critiques, the litmags who published these stories, the librarians and booksellers who support us all, and my loving (and patient) chosen family. Back to Joyce Carol Oates: her stories inspired my efforts to explore my own voice and edge, and expanded my understanding of what was possible in literature.
This prize will change my life. Gig work has been my zigzag path to more writing time, usually meaning 2–3 simultaneous part-time jobs. The Joyce Carol Oates Prize will give me much more concentrated time to write my next book, saving me years of my life. I’m restraining myself from using exclamation points here, but they’re pulsing just under my skin. Thank you. I cannot wait to thank you in person in October and meet other writers, readers, and teachers who celebrate the freedom of the written word.”
Erika Krouse
“Save Me, Stranger is a collection of riveting first-person accounts, each so uniquely credible and engaging, the reader is inclined to think that it must be Erika Krouse herself speaking in an intimate, confining, candid way, telling us secrets she has shared with no one else. Yet—and this is the surprise and the delight of Erika’s fiction—each of the voices is a distinct character, usually but not always a young woman; locales are wildly different—from a Siberian village that is ‘the coldest place on earth’ to the lurid Red Light district of Bangkok; from a remote bed-and-breakfast in the Rocky Mountains to the outskirts of Tokyo—while each is perceived, by the astute eye of the beholder, as ‘the center of all rings, loneliness.’ Here is masterly storytelling, so deftly accomplished, with such warmth and sympathy, the reader is totally immersed in each story, wishing only sometimes that it might be longer, and our engagement with these so-human, so-fascinating characters prolonged.”
Joyce Carol Oates
“Seeing the world for what it is—how it works, who wins, who loses, and who barely manages to muddle along—and constructing the stories and language that will reveal the world to us in all its maddening (often), cruel (frequent), and astonishing (always) complexity is the job of writers, and no one brings more heart, soul, and scary-brilliant talent to the work than Erika Krouse. Save Me, Stranger floored me with the range of human experience it fearlessly tackles, everything from love and loss in the coldest town in the world, to sexual perversity in Bangkok, to a runaway teen selling ice cream on the mean streets of Omaha. Krouse carries the entire human condition in her head, and every gesture, emotion, and line of dialogue in her stories rings with the unmistakable clarity of revelation. She is more than a writer to watch; this is a writer to hang onto, dearly and at all costs, if we're to have any hope of making sense of ourselves.”
Ben Fountain
2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner; New Literary Project Board Member
“I am so delighted and moved to learn that Erika Krouse has received the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Over the past five years, I have had the privilege of working with Erika on both her fiction and nonfiction, and am continually astonished by her range, imagination, and immense talent. As you can feel in every page of her writing, Erika has a seemingly endless curiosity about our world and a boundless capacity for empathy. Her characters are nuanced and knotty, never romanticized and never judged. There is such an emotional expansiveness to her writing, regardless of length or format, and I am grateful to work with an author who shines a light into the darker corners of our world, unafraid of what might be revealed. Thank you to New Literary Project for championing her body of work and awarding her this richly deserved honor.”
Caroline Bleeke
Editorial Director, Fiction, Flatiron Books