February 2024

Jay Baron Nicorvo, Benjamin Grossberg, Bret Shepard, Molly Olguín

The 2023 winners’ books will be published in 2025. Also that year, AWP will host these authors in a featured event at the #AWP25 Conference & Bookfair. In the meantime, the Writer’s Chronicle asked this year’s winners for a short preview of their forthcoming books.

2023 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir by Jay Baron Nicorvo

Forthcoming 2025 from University of Georgia Press

Judge Geoff Dyer on Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir

“The (true) story unfolding in Best Copy Available is almost unrelentingly bleak but that relentlessness also makes it difficult to put down. The voice is jagged, dangerous, compelling and, above all, appropriate.”

Winner Jay Baron Nicorvo on Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir

“In winter of 1984, Sharon Nicorvo was violently raped while delivering pizza to the barracks at Fort Monmouth Army Base in hardscrabble New Jersey. Meanwhile, her son Jay, seven years old at the time, was being subjected to repeated, and secret, sexual abuses at the hands of a babysitter. Best Copy Available: A True Crime Memoir delves unflinching into these devastating events. Thirty years later, in receiving a photocopy of the criminal investigation report generated out of that brutal Jersey night, Nicorvo finds a primer to better understand certain assumptions. About class and race. Sex and violence. Crime and punishment. Low and high culture. And the facsimile nature of the truth.

As various American men—some real, some imagined, all prone to violence—move in and then out of their lives, mother and son spend decades avoiding and ultimately confronting what happened to them in that formative year, 1984. Going from the Jersey Shore to the Gulf Coast of Florida before culminating in the Midwest, Best Copy Available tells a ranging American story, by turns harrowing and hilarious, of how the love of a single mother helped end an awful cycle of abuse and abandonment.

Most ambitiously, Best Copy Available lends voice to an alternate version of American boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood. One where the sons of deadbeat dads may grow up to be stay-at-home dads, and where our boys and men may come to realize that the most courageous show of strength, these days, is not the determined use of force. It’s knowing when and how to ask for help.”

2023 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel

The Spring Before Obergefell by Benjamin Grossberg

Forthcoming 2025 from University of Nebraska Press

Judge Percival Everett on The Spring Before Obergefell

“The world of this novel is patiently rendered with language that is direct, unadorned, and yet full. The characters here are presented with the kind of affection that is rare in much current literature. This is a love story and a growth story and a story about how the world changes and affects our self-definition, confidence, and place within it. The relationships are familiar but not cliché, surprising but not sensational. I love the honesty and openness of this novel.”

Winner Benjamin Grossberg on The Spring Before Obergefell

“The Spring Before Obergefell tells the story of Mike Breck, a fifty-year-old gay man who lives out in corn-and-soybean country. He teaches a few classes at the local community college, works part-time at Lowe’s, and fixes up his place. Add in burning time on hook-up apps and bickering with his father, a hardened conservative who moved in after his wife died, and that’s Mike’s life: shut down, isolated.

But in early February of 2015, Mike meets two men. Vibrant and urbane, Matteo is a recent transplant from Houston. During their first coffee date, he propositions Mike. A few days later, Dave, a nurse’s aide, scrapes Mike’s car in a parking lot. Dave is uninsured, but he says that his brother owns a body shop. The novel follows Mike’s connection to these men, each of whom wakes him up in a different way. 

I wrote Obergefell because I wanted to read a love story that involved characters like the guys I know: Gen Xers raised not to show much emotion, who were forged in an era of rampant homophobia and came out at the height of the US AIDS epidemic. I wanted to write about men shaped by those forces who still manage to find a way through to the world that Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationally, opens up for us.” 

2023 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Absent Here by Bret Shepard

Forthcoming 2025 from University of Pittsburgh Press

Judge Heid E. Erdrich on Absent Here

“Visual, sensual, and clear, this collection maps a distinctly Alaskan space. The relationships, realities, land, sky, creatures, waters—ice—of the Arctic breathe in these poems like characters. There's a tricky math at work: each poem adds or subtracts from what a lone human can know. This is life as some gorgeous zero-sum game. These poems encourage us, even if defined by howling absence, to mark the present and live, simply live, in it.”

Winner Bret Shepard on Absent Here

“My work in Absent Here focuses partly on my life on the North Slope of Alaska. One organizing thread is a series of poems called ‘Here but Elsewhere.’ The poems in that sequence merge events and objects with meditative moments. These are not just my stories, though they all come from my experiences, from seeing the land and water as more than background. 

It took me some time to find language, rhythm, and form for these things. My first collection only had a couple of poems referencing Alaska, even though I had written about it consistently over some years. Eventually I began to find under-layers in objects like ice or the different things that grow along tundra. The poems in the collection that aren’t directly about Alaska still live somewhere in the distances between people and places, between interior and exterior, between heat and cold. 

What I am also doing in the poems is writing to remember where I am from—the people, places, traditions, challenges—and writing it helps connect me in a way that I have missed since living outside of Alaska.”

2023 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction

The Sea Gives Up the Dead by Molly Olguín 

Forthcoming 2025 from Red Hen Press

Judge Carmen Maria Machado on The Sea Gives Up the Dead

“I could not be more excited by this haunting, lush, genre-leaping collection—reading it, I am reminded of how I felt when I first encountered Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Gorgeously written, imaginative, startling—The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a wunderkammer of beauty and sorrow.”

Winner Molly Olguín on The Sea Gives Up the Dead

“The Sea Gives Up the Dead is a collection of stories sprinkled into the soil of fairytale and left to take root and grow wild there. These are stories about my family; they are also stories about saints and apocalypses and robots and cold bowls of dead puppies. A girl drowns and doesn’t rot. Three kids plot to blow up their dad. A lovesick nanny slays a dragon. These stories are about queer love, grief, forgiveness, and longing. You know, family stuff. 

My favorite thing about genre fiction is also my favorite thing about historical fiction: they’re both mirrors that show us something real about ourselves, but flipped the wrong way round. In these magical-historical-science-fictional stories, I hope to do the same thing: to hold up an uncanny little mirror to the world and see what looks back.”