2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Finalists Announced
OAKLAND, CA, March 26, 2024—New Literary Project is honored to announce the five distinguished finalists for the 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize (JCO). The finalists for the $50,000 prize for a mid-career author of fiction and their most recent publications are:
Jamel Brinkley, Witness (FSG)
Patricia Engel, The Faraway World (Avid Reader)
Ben Fountain, Devil Makes Three (Flatiron)
Idra Novey, Take What You Need (Viking)
Bennett Sims, Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio)
This is the eighth year the JCO Prize will be awarded. The Prize celebrates 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 JCO Prize is a working prize, and the eventual recipient will take up brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the Bay Area including Saint Mary’s College of California–teaching and public speaking–during a period to be determined in Fall 2024.
Thirty-one authors were earlier longlisted and considered. The jury, which handed up the shortlist to the Board of Directors, consisted of Laura Cogan, Mark Danner, Joseph Di Prisco, Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong, and David Wood. The NewLit Board of Directors, which judges and makes the final decision, will announce the Recipient in mid-April 2024.
“New Literary Project is proud to celebrate the richly diverse and supremely accomplished set of authors who are 2024 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
Former JCO award-winners, who continue their supportive efforts and engagements with New Literary Project, are:
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 A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (Little, Brown)
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)
From 2017 to 2024, 310 mid-career authors published by fifty-five houses have been longlisted, and forty were shortlisted as finalists.
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the preeminent author, who serves as an honorary member of the NewLit’s Board of Directors, and who earlier 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, 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.
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. 5, appeared in October 2023 (Rare Bird).
New Literary Project also recently announced the 2024 Jack Hazard Fellowships, which are $5,000 summer awards annually given to support exceptional creative writers who are full-time high school educators throughout the United States. Thirty-two Jack Hazard Fellows from around the nation have been selected since 2022.
For more information, please contact:
Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, (510) 919-0970