Joyce Carol Oates Prize
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named in honor of the preeminent author, and our colleague. In the past, Joyce served as Simpson Project Writer-in-Residence, and today she sits on the New Literary Project Board of Directors as an honorary member. NewLit gratefully acknowledges her inspiring, lifelong impact as peerless teacher and writer, an author beloved and admired by legions of students, writers, and readers around the country and the world. She embodies the Project’s most deeply held commitments to literature and literacy, arts and education, in order to enhance the lives of students, readers, and writers across generations and diverse communities.
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize annually honors a mid-career fiction writer who has earned a distinguished reputation and the approbation and gratitude of readers. This prize is awarded not in recognition of a book, but for an author: an already emerged and still emerging author of national consequence—short stories and/or novels—at the relatively middle stage of a burgeoning career. By mid-career we mean an author who has published at least two notable books of fiction, and who has yet to receive capstone recognition such as a Pulitzer or a MacArthur. Otherwise there are no age, geographic, or stylistic restrictions. The winner receives a $50,000 award to encourage and support forthcoming work. The Prize is a working prize, in the sense that each year the winner is in brief fall residence (seven to ten days) at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bay Area, where they may give public readings and talks, teach classes, and make appearances.
An application process is announced in the fall of every year, after which a distinguished jury considers an assembled longlist. Eventually, jurors hand up the names of finalists to the New Literary Project Board, which ultimately decides upon the Prize.
2023 Prize Winner Manuel Muñoz
2022 Prize Winner Lauren Groff
2021 Prize Winner Danielle Evans
2020 Prize Winner Daniel Mason
2019 Prize Winner Laila Lalami
2018 Prize Winner Anthony Marra
2017 Prize Winner T. Geronimo Johnson
NewLit deeply, humbly appreciates the trust of many generous individuals as well as altruistic family foundations and corporate donors who subscribe to our vision and who help make real our multifaceted, high-impact, innovative programs.
NewLit is pleased to announce the Finalists for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Read the announcement.
2023 Recipient: Manuel Muñoz
Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and an appearance in Best American Short Stories. His most recent book, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press in 2022. A native of Dinuba, California, he currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.
2022 Recipient: Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent being the novel Matrix (2021). Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, and France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, was a three time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Prize. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
Watch the Meet the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Event.
2021 Recipient: Danielle Evans
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collections The Office of Historical Corrections and Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. Her work has won awards and honors including the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, and the Paterson Prize for fiction. She is a 2011 National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow. Her stories have appeared in magazines including The Paris Review, A Public Space, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, The Sewanee Review, and Phoebe, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2008, 2010, 2017, and 2018, and in New Stories From The South.
She received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, previously taught creative writing at American University in Washington DC and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and currently teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
Watch the Meet the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Event.
2020 Recipient: Daniel Mason
Daniel Mason is a physician and author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier (2018), and A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020). His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, awarded the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. The Piano Tuner was produced as an opera by Music Theatre Wales, and adapted to the stage by Lifeline Theatre. His short stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope: All Story and Lapham’s Quarterly; in 2014 he was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Clinical Assistant Professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, his research and teaching interests include the subjective experience of mental illness and the influence of literature, history, and culture on the practice of medicine.
Watch the Meet the 2020 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Event.
2019 Recipient: Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was on the Man Booker Prize longlist and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She writes the “Between the Lines” column for The Nation magazine and is a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times. The recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her new novel, The Other Americans, will be published by Pantheon in March 2019. You can order it on IndieBound and Amazon.
2018 Recipient: Anthony Marra
Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the NBCC’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and Greece’s Athens Prize for Literature. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, the National Magazine Award, the Berlin Prize Fellowship, and his work has been translated into seventeen languages. In 2017, Granta included Marra on its decennial Best Young American Novelists list. He has taught at Stanford University, and currently lives in Oakland, CA.
Watch the Meet the 2018 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Event.
Read an essay by Anthony Marra on his year as a Simpson Literary Prize recipient.
2017 Recipient: T. Geronimo Johnson
T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Johnson has taught writing at UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Writers’ Workshop, the Prague Summer Program, Oregon State University, San Quentin, and elsewhere. He has worked on, at, or in brokerages, kitchens, construction sites, phone rooms, education nonprofits, writing centers, summer camps, ladies shoe stores, nightclubs, law firms, offset print shops, and a (pre-2016) political campaign that shall remain unnamed. He also wrote a couple of novels that have—between the two—been selected by the Wall Street Journal Book Club, named a 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, shortlisted for the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, a finalist for The Bridge Book Award, a finalist for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, included on Time Magazine’s list of the top ten books of 2015, awarded the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and named the winner of the 2015 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Johnson was a 2016 National Book Award judge. He lives in Berkeley, CA.
Watch the Meet the 2017 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Event.
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