Erika Krouse Wins 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize From New Literary Project
OAKLAND, CA, May 5, 2026—Erika Krouse, of Colorado, is the eleventh recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize awarded by New Literary Project. The author receives $50,000. Her most recent publication is a book of short stories, Save Me, Stranger (Flatiron Books). Prize recipients are emerged and continually emerging writers of major consequence—short stories and/or novels—at the relative midpoint of a burgeoning career.
The Prize stands not only as testament to Krouse’s impressive literary accomplishments as a mid-career author, but also as encouragement and support for work to come. The author represents the resilience, power, and diversity of our national literary communities, and unforgettably gives voice, in her resonantly distinctive style, to the most urgent issues of today.
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize (JCO) is named after the eminent author, an honorary member of New Literary Project’s Board of Directors. She earlier served as NewLit’s Writer-in-Residence. The Project hereby gratefully acknowledges her inspiring, lifelong impact as peerless teacher and writer, an author beloved and admired for generations by legions of students, writers, and readers around the country and the world. She embodies the nonprofit organization’s most deeply held commitments to literature and literacy, arts education, and free speech.
The annual JCO Prize honors mid-career authors of fiction who advance the vision and mission of NewLit–to drive social change and unleash artistic power across the generations and the nation. In this way, NewLit aims to contribute to, and lift up, a literate, democratic society.
Yes, the planet needs rescuing, and people need food and housing and health care. The world needs all that and more. The world also needs the nourishment, refuge, and attention of the arts. Young people who are marginalized—now speaking in their own voices. Writers now telling, and teachers now teaching, the stories of our lives. That’s what helps make democracy a democracy. That’s what NewLit is doing.
The JCO Prize is a working prize, and Erika Krouse will take up brief residence during the 2026 NewLit Roadshow at the University of California, Berkeley (NewLit marquee partner), and in the Bay Area, including especially Saint Mary’s College of California–teaching and public speaking in a variety of educational and literary settings–in October 2026, dates and occasions to be determined.
The winning author was chosen after consideration of a longlist of twenty eight nationally recognized authors, and eventually a shortlist that included four other extraordinary artists: Katie Kitamura, Lori Ostlund, Jamie Quatro, and Danzy Senna. The jury that selected the short list consisted of Laura Cogan, Joseph Di Prisco, Fiona McFarlane, Molly Metherd, Geoffrey O’Brien, and David Wood. The NewLit Board of Directors judged and selected the Recipient.
“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
“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
JCO Prize Winners: 2017–2026
and representative works of their fiction
2026: Erika Krouse, author of Save Me, Stranger (Flatiron)
2025: Jennine Capó Crucet, author of Say Hello to My Little Friend (Simon & Schuster)
2025: Willy Vlautin, author of The Horse (Harper)
2024: Ben Fountain, author of Devil Makes Three (Flatiron)
2023: Manuel Muñoz, author of The Consequences (Graywolf)
2022: Lauren Groff, author of Matrix (Riverhead)
2021: Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections (Riverhead)
2020: Daniel Mason, author of North Woods (Random House)
2019: Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans (Pantheon)
2018: Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth)
2017: T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Welcome to Braggsville (HarperCollins)
Since 2017, 371 mid-career authors published by fifty-eight houses have been longlisted, and forty-nine shortlisted as finalists.
NEW LITERARY PROJECT
New Literary Project, a 501(c)3 public benefit not-for-profit, was founded in 2015 through an innovative private/public marquee partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department, collaborating with visionary community leaders. Cal has long been the foremost English Department in the world at the leading public university in the world. In 2023, the highly esteemed Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program joined as an essential partner.
The Project drives social change by unleashing artistic power in order to lift up a literate, democratic society. Sustained by generous individual, corporate, and foundation donors, NewLit fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances the lives of readers, writers, educators, librarians, and students across generations and divides, in California and the nation. Its mantra proceeds from the counsel of Joyce Carol Oates: “Write your heart out.”
As well as the JCO Prize, and as with every year of its existence, NewLit offers creative writing workshops at no cost to high school-age writers from neglected, overlooked, undervalued communities, teenagers with previously insufficient access to arts education. In 2026, NewLit expanded workshop offerings to include adults at Hope Solutions who are transitioning from homelessness.
Bonnie Bonetti-Bell Fellows, creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department, and Iris Starn Fellows, creative writers from the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program, lead eleven creative writing workshops in the Bay Area in Spring 2025, at sites such as Hope Solutions, Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. Alameda County, Concord High School, Albany High School, Northgate High School, and elsewhere. Workshops are sustained by the Bell and Starn families, partnering with the Berkeley English Department and the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program.
In addition, the Project curates an internationally distributed (by Simon & Schuster) annual anthology of NewLit-affiliated artists, including Prize finalists and Joyce Carol Oates and a host of other distinguished authors alongside younger writers from NewLit workshops published for the first time: Simpsonistas: Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 7, appeared in October 2025 (Rare Bird). Vol. 8 will be released in Fall 2026.
New Literary Project also recently announced 2026 Jack Hazard Fellowships, $5,000 summer awards annually given to support exceptional creative writers who are full-time high school educators throughout the United States. The awards are intended to celebrate these writer/teachers and to free up their summers, enabling them them to pursue their creative writing. Thanks to the generous support of System Property, forty-five Jack Hazard Fellows from seventeen states around the nation have been selected since 2022.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director