2011 Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen lives in New York City. His trio of novellas, Emission, will be published by Graywolf in 2012. He is the author of 800-page story of the Last Jew, Witz, named one of the 10 best books of 2010 by the Village Voice, and described by the New York Times as "a brave and artful attempt to explore and explode the limits of the sentence". He is also the author of the novels, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, and A Heaven of Others, as well as two collections of stories, Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge), and The Quorum; and a book about the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed. Cohen wrote the introduction to the novel, Landscape in Concrete by Jakov Lind, and his fiction and essays have appeared in The Believer, Harper's Magazine, London Review of Books, N+1, New York Observer, New York Times, Paris Review, Black Warrior Review, Bookforum, Camera Obscura, Denver Quarterly, The Forward, Guernica, Tablet Magazine, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere.

First alternate: Matthew Baker.

Special mention: Eva Talmadge, Joshua Ferris, Michael Dumanis, Nam Le, Lenore Myka, , Monica Ferrell, Josh Weil, William Lobko, Deborah Willis, and Robert Isenberg.

2010 Emma Jones

Emma Jones, an Australian, is currently poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria, England, and is author of one volume of verse, The Striped World (Faber & Faber, 2009), which won both Australia’s Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, as well as the Forward Poetry Prize for first book, the UK's most prestigious award for a first book of poems. She is also a recipient of the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2005), and her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Slate, Poetry London,Warwick Review, Island, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other publications. She is editor of The Faber Christina Rossetti (2011), and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from Trinity College, Cambridge.

First Alternate: Jennifer Chang
Special Mention: Derek Mong, Sandra Beasley, Anne Sanow, and Chloe Honum

2009 Salvatore Scibona

Salvatore Scibona’s first book, The End, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and winner of the 2009 Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library. His fiction has been published in the Threepenny Review, Best New American Voices 2004, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories: The Best Stories from a Quarter-Century of the Pushcart Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the writing coordinator at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

2008 Amity Gaige

Amity Gaige is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. Her first novel, O My Darling (Other Press, 2005), garnered her recognition as one of the "Five Under 35" outstanding emerging novelists by the National Book Foundation. Her second novel, The Folded World (Other Press, 2007/Random House, 2009), was named ForeWord Book of the Year, best book of fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The Yale Review, the Literary Review, O Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. She is also the recipient of a McDowell Colony Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship.