Jennine Capó Crucet & Willy Vlautin Win 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prizes From New Literary Project
(Oakland, CA) April 29, 2025—
Jennine Capó Crucet, of North Carolina, and Willy Vlautin, of Oregon, have been named the ninth and tenth Recipients of the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prizes (JCO) awarded by New Literary Project (NewLit). Each receives $50,000 on the occasion of NewLit’s tenth anniversary in 2025.
These prizes stand not only as testament to Crucet’s and Vlautin’s impressive literary accomplishments as mid-career authors, but also as encouragement and support for work to come. Both authors represent the resilience, power, and diversity of our national communities, and both unforgettably give voice, in their resonantly distinctive styles, to the most urgent issues of today.
From working-class Nevada to working-class Miami, these authors take on immigration, climate change, music, justice, violence and lost opportunity, and they do so with humor mixed with the tragic, devoid of sentimentality and packed with compassion. Along the way, they tell the stories of a distressed horse and a captive orca, whose lives are impossible to forget. In the largest sense, together these writers amount to, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates for the NewLit Board of Directors, “an allegory of America.”
Jennine Capó Crucet’s most recent publication is Say Hello to My Little Friend, Simon & Schuster (2024). Willy Vlautin’s is The Horse, HarperCollins (2024).
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. The 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 JCO Prize is a working prize, and the winning authors will take up brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley (NewLit marquee partner), and in the Bay Area, including Saint Mary’s College of California–teaching and public speaking in a variety of educational and literary settings–in early November 2025, dates and occasions to be determined.
The winning authors were chosen after consideration of a longlist of thirty-two nationally recognized authors, and eventually a shortlist that included three other accomplished artists: Sarah Manguso, Julia Phillps, and Morgan Talty. The jury that selected the short list consisted of Laura Cogan, Mark Danner, Joseph Di Prisco, and Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong. The NewLit Board of Directors judged and selected the Recipients.
Jennine Capó Crucet (she/her/ella) is a writer and educator. A recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize and a former Contributing Opinion Writer for The New York Times, she’s the author of four books: the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, which won the International Latino Book Award and has been adopted as an all-campus/community read at over forty U.S. universities; the multiple award-winning story collection How to Leave Hialeah; and the essay collection My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her most recent book, the critically acclaimed novel Say Hello to My Little Friend, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized, and her work has appeared on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and other national and international publications. She’s worked as a professor of creative writing and has taught workshops at conferences across the country. She’s also worked as a screenwriter, a college access counselor to first-generation college students, and as a sketch comedienne (though not all at the same time). Born and raised in Miami, she lives in North Carolina with her family.
“It’s hard for me to articulate just how much it means to me to win the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and to join the list of previous recipients—all writers whose work and careers I deeply admire and from whom I’ve learned so much. The best I can do for now is express my gratitude: Thank you to the New Literary Project and its Board of Directors, UC Berkeley, Saint Mary’s College, and all their supporters and partners for the vital work they do in encouraging people to “write their hearts out” and for investing in writers at all stages of their careers. I cannot wait to join you all for the fall residency and be part of such a vibrant, nourishing community. Thank you to the jurors for selecting an incredible list of finalists; I’m honored to be among such stellar company. Thanks to each of the finalists for creating boldly and bravely, and much love to the incomparable Joyce Carol Oates, who leads us by example in that and other writerly realms. Thank you to every librarian, bookseller, and teacher out there, for their commitment to doing the hard work of keeping our hearts and minds open. I’m eternally grateful to my literary agent, Maria Massie, for her care and brilliance. I don’t know where I’d be without her powerful faith in my work, her support, and her friendship. Oceans of gratitude to my editor, Tim O’Connell, for his superb editorial skills and for steadfastly believing in Say Hello to My Little Friend and its aims from the moment he first read it. Every writer should be so lucky as to have an editorial force like Tim in their corner. Thank you to the incredible Gina Mingacci, for all the doors she’s opened (and wisely closed) and for her invaluable mentorship. My deepest thanks, always, goes to my family: to my beloved ancestors, for their wisdom, guidance, and protection; and to Esmé and Derek, for filling every single day with love, joy, and so much laughter. Without you two and the miracle of your love, there is no writing.”
—Jennine Capó Crucet
“Jennine Capó Crucet is a writer who reminds us what words can do. Their power. Their unknowable mystery. She is a creator and a searcher for what is just, but she is also an entertainer, someone who understands inherently what happens when structure and imagination collide—that sacred space where language transforms and reaches back into the very soul of a place or a people or a culture. In Say Hello To My Little Friend, Jennine blends two seemingly antipodal pillars of the American consciousness—Scarface and Moby Dick—to create a homage to the city of Miami. The novel, like the water that runs through it, touches on everything: Cuban immigration, the restacking of the American Dream, climate crises, Pitbull’s musical canon, and one very intelligent killer whale, Lolita, whose all-seeing eye guides, consumes, and seeks justice, love, knowledge, freedom, and empowerment from the world that she has been cut off from. In combining these things, Jennine has done something I’ve never seen before, threaded a needle-sized needle with an orca-sized orca to tell the story of a city, its people, in a way that left me utterly slack jawed with her humor and brilliance. Thank you to the New Literary Project for selecting Jennine and Say Hello to My Little Friend for this remarkable honor. It’s a work that inspires boldness, something she has done for her whole career and hopefully something with this acknowledgement she can engender in others.”
—Tim O’Connell, Vice President, Editor, Simon & Schuster
Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, Willy Vlautin is the author of seven novels and is the founder of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. Vlautin started writing stories and songs at the age of eleven after receiving his first guitar. Inspired by songwriters and novelists like Paul Kelly, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, William Kennedy, Lucia Berlin, and John Steinbeck, Vlautin works diligently to tell working class stories in his novels and songs.
Vlautin has been the recipient of three Oregon Book Awards, The Nevada Silver Pen Award, and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame and the Oregon Music Hall of Fame. He was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Three of his novels, The Motel Life, Lean on Pete, and The Night Always Comes have been adapted as films. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages. Vlautin teaches at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program and lives near Portland, Oregon with his wife, dog, cats, and horses.
“I’ve been in love with the novel for most of my life. I was nineteen when I began working on my first one. I wasn’t a great student, I had taken no writing classes, I just had a big edge to me and a wish to tell working class stories. Never once did I think I’d publish one or thirty-eight years later be fortunate enough to receive the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. When I heard this great news the first thing I thought of were my novels. They have been such great pals to me and have gotten me through a lot of hard years, so to be appreciated for them, well, I wanted to load them up in the car and take them out on the town for a serious night of celebration. So much of recognition in art is luck and I’ve been a very fortunate man that way. I met my agent, Lesley Thorne, over twenty years ago at a gig I was playing. She’s been a great advocate, friend, and champion of my books ever since. Amy Baker, my brilliant editor at HarperCollins, has always believed in working class fiction and has helped shape and focus my novels and has never once given up on them or let one of them fall through the cracks like so many novels do. I’m so grateful for her friendship and guidance. And my wife, Lee, who has put up with a man who plays 1960’s Italian soundtrack records every day and lives inside other worlds for a living. She’s the smartest, the toughest, and the coolest. My books and I are so honored and grateful for this recognition and to now be a part of New Literary Project.”
—Willy Vlautin
“It was so exciting and rewarding to learn that Willy Vlautin is a recipient of the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. I’ve had the great pleasure and privilege of working with Willy for nearly twenty years over the course of seven published books (and counting). Through each of his remarkable novels, I’ve been impressed by the power of his words to deeply resonate, illuminate, and remain. I find myself still thinking about his characters, wondering how they’re holding up in such difficult times and hoping they’re getting by. Willy has an extraordinary talent for confronting issues facing modern America. His novels cover themes including health care, homelessness, the housing crisis, the toll war takes on veterans and their families, addiction, mental health, loneliness, and regret. His portraits of everyday Americans are often heartbreaking, sometimes harrowing, but always hopeful, and they are bearable through the gentle care and respect he shows his characters and the resiliency of the human heart. Reading his work is an exercise in empathy and a lesson on how to be a better human being. I am so proud of Willy for his dedication to telling these often difficult but necessary stories with unsentimental compassion, and I am so grateful to New Literary Project for honoring his body of work with this esteemed prize.”
—Amy Baker, VP/Associate Publisher and Editorial Director, HarperCollins
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the eminent author, an honorary member of New Literary Project’s Board of Directors. She earlier served as New Literary Project Writer-in-Residence. NewLit thereby 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 NewLit’s most deeply held commitments to literature and literacy, arts education, and free speech.
JCO Prize Winners: 2017-2025
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, 342 mid-career authors published by fifty-six houses have been longlisted, and forty-five shortlisted as finalists.
New Literary Project, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit, was established 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 nation. In 2023, the highly esteemed Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program joined as a valued partner. NewLit celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2025.
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 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.
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 nine creative writing workshops in the Bay Area in Spring 2024, at sites such as 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 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. 6, appeared in October 2024 (Rare Bird). Vol. 7 will be released in September 2025.
New Literary Project also recently announced the 2025 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. Thanks to the generous support of System Property, thirty-eight Jack Hazard Fellows from fifteen states around the nation have been selected since 2022.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, (510) 919-0970