2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists
OAKLAND, CA, March 7, 2023—New Literary Project is honored to announce the five outstanding finalists for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. This is the seventh year the $50,000 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 the award to encourage and support current and future work. The jury, which handed up the shortlist to the Board of Directors, consisted of Laura Cogan, Mark Danner, Joseph Di Prisco, Donna Jones, and David Wood. The Board of Directors, which judges, will announce the Recipient in early April 2023.
The Recipient of the 2023 Prize will be in residence at the University of California, Berkeley and the Bay Area on dates to be determined in October 2023.
The five finalists and their most recent publications are:
Rabih Alameddine, The Wrong End of the Telescope (Grove Atlantic)
Clare Beams, The Illness Lesson (Doubleday)
James Hannaham, Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (Little, Brown)
David Means, Two Nurses, Smoking (FSG)
Manuel Muñoz, The Consequences (Graywolf)
“New Literary Project is proud to celebrate the richly diverse and supremely accomplished set of authors who are 2023 JCO Prize Finalists. They dramatize and illuminate the prevailing issues of the day as well as timeless, universal preoccupations, and in this fashion these impressive writers cultivate fresh, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, innovative ways to shed light upon readers’ lives everywhere. In the process, they speak to NewLit’s cherished values and bedrock purpose, to enhance the lives of all who care about literature, the arts, education, schools, and human aspiration.”
—Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, New Literary Project
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the preeminent author, who serves as an honorary member of the Project’s Board of Directors, and who has previously served as New Literary Project Writer-in-Residence. In naming the Prize, the Project 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 Project’s most deeply held commitments to literature and literacy.
New Literary Project, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit public benefit corporation, was established in 2016, 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.
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. Its mantra proceeds from the counsel of Joyce Carol Oates: “Write your heart out.”
As with every year of its existence, NewLit offers high-school age writers workshops at no cost this spring to younger aspiring writers with previously insufficient access to arts education.
Simpson Fellows, creative writers from the UC Berkeley English Department, will lead five workshops for teenagers at Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. of Alameda County (2), Cal Prep, and Northgate High School.
Starn Fellows, creative writers from the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program, will lead two workshops at the public Emery High School, Emeryville, California.
In addition, the Project curates 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: Tales from New Literary Project Vol. 4, appeared in Fall 2022 (Rare Bird). Alongside a host of distinguished authors like Oates appear younger previously unpublished writers from our workshops.
New Literary Project will soon announce the second generation of fourteen recipients of $5,000 summer awards, annual Jack Hazard Fellowships for creative writers who are full-time high school educators anywhere in the United States.
Previous JCO award-winners, who are expected to continue their supportive efforts and engagements with 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)
2019 Prize Winner Laila Lalami, author of The Other Americans (Pantheon)
2020 Prize Winner Daniel Mason, author of A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (Little, Brown)
2021 Prize Winner Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Collections (Riverhead Books
2022 Prize Winner Lauren Groff, author of Matrix (Riverhead)
