2025 Joyce Carol Oates Finalists Announced
OAKLAND, CA, March 11, 2025 — New Literary Project is honored to announce the five distinguished finalists for the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize (JCO). The shortlisted finalists for the $50,000 prize for a mid-career author of fiction and their most recent publications are:
Jennine Capó Crucet, North Carolina, Say Hello to My Little Friend (Simon & Schuster)
Sarah Manguso, California, Liars (Hogarth)
Julia Phillips, New York, Bear (Hogarth)
Morgan Talty, Maine, Fire Exit (Tin House)
Willy Vlautin, Oregon, The Horse (Harper)
The annual JCO Prize recognizes an exceptionally distinguished mid-career author of fiction, one who has emerged and is still emerging, and one who can best advance the mission and represent the vision of not-for-profit New Literary Project (NewLit).
From left to right: Jennine Capó Crucet, Sarah Manguso, Julia Phillips, Morgan Talty, and Willy Vlautin. Photo credits include: Carolyn de Berry, Beowulf Sheehan, Nina Subin, Becky Kraemer, and Bobby Abrahamson.
The Prize celebrates fiction writers of consequence—short stories and/or novels—at the relative midpoint of a burgeoning career. Prize winners receive the award to honor past achievement as well as to encourage and support current and future work. In mid-April, the ninth JCO Prize will be awarded.
The JCO Prize is a working prize, and the eventual recipient will take up brief residence at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Bay Area including Saint Mary’s College of California–teaching and public speaking–during a period to be determined in Fall 2025.
Thirty-two authors were earlier longlisted and considered. The jury, which handed up the shortlist of finalists to the NewLit Board of Directors, consisted of Laura Cogan, Mark Danner, Joseph Di Prisco, and Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong. The NewLit Board of Directors judges and makes the final decision.
“New Literary Project is proud to celebrate the richly diverse and supremely accomplished set of authors who are 2025 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, arts education, schools, and human aspiration.”
—Diane Del Signore, Executive Director, New Literary Project
Former JCO prize-winners, who continue their supportive efforts and engagements with NewLit, are:
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 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 2025, 342 mid-career authors published by fifty-six houses have been longlisted, and forty-five shortlisted as finalists.
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize is named for the preeminent author, who serves as an honorary member of the NewLit 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
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 and artists. 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 Bonetti-Bell and Starn Creative Writing Workshops in the Bay Area in Spring 2025, at sites such as Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, Girls Inc. Alameda County, Concord High School, Albany High School, Northgate High School, East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, and elsewhere. Workshops are generously 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 will also announce this spring 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. Thirty-three Jack Hazard Fellows from eighteen states around the nation have been selected since 2022.
For more information, please contact:
Hannah Onstad, Communications Director, (510) 710-1859
https://www.newliteraryproject.org/