February 2024

Chloé Cooper Jones, Jason Mott, Kimiko Hahn, Deesha Philyaw

Let’s meet the 2024 AWP Award Series judges!

2024 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction 

Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and TIME Magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and an Associate Professor of Writing at Columbia University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel

Jason Mott is the author of two poetry collections and four novels. His first novel, The Returned, was adapted for television and aired on ABC under the title Resurrection. Since then, his novels that followed have received various accolades and acclaim. His most recent novel, Hell of a Book, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, was an Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist nominee, and was the winner of the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction. He lives in hermitude in southeastern North Carolina.

2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Kimiko Hahn casts a wide net for subject matter. In her latest collection, Foreign Bodies, she revisits the personal as political while exploring the immigrant body, the endangered animal's body, objects removed from children's bodies, hoarded things, and charms. Previous books Toxic Flora and Brain Fever were prompted by fields of science; The Narrow Road to the Interior takes title and forms from Basho's famous journals. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation. Hahn is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

2024 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow. Her debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2025. She currently lives in Oakland, California.