Writing Our Hearts Out Again this Year

2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

We’re thrilled to announce the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists & Their Most Recent Published Books:

Christopher Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts (Tin House)
Percival Everett, The Trees (Graywolf Press)
Lauren Groff, Matrix (Riverhead Books)
Katie Kitamura, Intimacies (Riverhead Books)
Jason Mott, Hell of a Book (Dutton)

You can read more about the finalists here, and read the press release here.

If you wish a perfect reading list for our troubling and troubled times, these five authors are for you. They are prodigiously talented and resonating writers who capture our cultural, political, artistic, and social tensions, and they imaginatively engage with the questions that preoccupy and define us. They do so in unexpected ways: by turns moving, subtle, hilarious, brave, impassioned, heartbreaking, and brilliantly original. The pandemic may have lured us into reading fiction in unprecedented fashion. We may or may not term that an upside, exactly, though novels and short stories do have a way of illuminating shadows and piloting us through depths. Nonetheless, these are guides to take you to new places—and home all over again. We are honored to celebrate them as the Finalists for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

—Joseph Di Prisco, Chair, New Literary Project

2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Visiting next week

We’re looking forward to hosting Danielle Evans, 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize winner, next week in the Bay Area. Please join us for the following events:

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

5:30 pm

UC Berkeley

Wheeler Hall, 315 Wheeler (Maude Fife Room)

Danielle Evans in conversation with Beth Piatote, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley Native American Studies Department
More information about this event here.

Friday, March 11, 2022

7:00 pm

Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation

Don Tatzin Community Hall

Danielle Evans in conversation with Donna Jones, Associate Professor, UC Berkeley English Department

More information about this event here.

Donate Now

New Literary Project is grateful for generous institutional support from philanthropic and corporate sponsors who, along with our many loyal individual donors, drive social change and make possible serving students, teachers, and writers across generations: Wood Family Foundation, Simpson PSB Fund, System Property, Literary Arts Emergency Fund through the Mellon Foundation, Penguin Random House, Busby Communications, and the Miner Anderson Family Foundation.