2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists Announced
LAFAYETTE, CA, March 3, 2022—The New Literary Project is pleased to announce the shortlist of five outstanding finalists for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. This is the sixth year The Prize will be awarded to a mid-career author of fiction who has earned an extraordinarily distinguished reputation and garnered the widespread appreciation of readers.
The Prize recognizes emerged and continually emerging authors of major consequence—short stories and/or novels—at the relative midpoint of a burgeoning career. Prize winners receive a $50,000 award to encourage and support their current and future work.
The winner of the 2022 Prize also will be in residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bay Area in October 2022.
The five finalists and their most recent publications are:
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)
“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
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the eminent author, who serves as an honorary member of the Project’s board of directors, and who has served as New Literary Project Writer-in-Residence. In naming the Prize, the Project gratefully acknowledges her inspiring, lifelong impact as a teacher and writer without peer, a writer beloved for generations 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.
The New Literary Project was established in 2016, through an innovative private/public partnership with the University of California, Berkeley, English Department and visionary community leaders.
The Project drives social change by unleashing artistic power in order to lift up a literate, democratic society. It fosters new literature, supports authors, and enhances the lives of readers, writers, educators, librarians, and students across generations and in diverse communities in California and the nation.
The Project offers high-school age writers writing workshops at no cost, led by New Literary Project Simpson Fellows, who are creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department. Also, workshops for teenagers will take place this spring at Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. of Alameda County, Cal Prep, and Northgate High School. In addition, the Project causes to be published an internationally distributed annual anthology of Project-related artists, including Prize finalists and Joyce Carol Oates as well as younger writers published for the first time: Simpsonistas, Vol. 4, will appear in Fall 2022 (Rare Bird). The New Literary Project also will announce this Spring the first nine recipients of $5,000 summer awards of the annual Jack Hazard Fellowships for creative writers who are full-time high school teachers.
Previous JCO award-winners, who are expected to continue their supportive efforts and engagements with the New Literary Project, are:
2017 Prize Winner T. Geronimo Johnson, author of Welcome to Braggsville (HarperCollins)
2018 Prize Winner Anthony Marra, author of The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth) (PenguinRandomHouse)
2019 Prize Winner Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans (Pantheon) (PenguinRandomHouse)
2020 Prize Winner Daniel Mason, author of A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (Little, Brown) (Hachette)
2021 Prize Winner Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Collections (Riverhead Books (PenguinRandomHouse)
For more information, please contact Diane Del Signore
510.919.0970 or diane@newliteraryproject.org
For media inquiries, please contact Scott Busby
310.600.7645 or scott@thebusbygroup.com