Here are the finalists for the $20,000 DAG Prize for Literature.
Today, the DAG Foundation announced the five finalists for the DAG Prize for Literature, a new annual award that grants $20,000 to “an early-career prose writer whose work expands the possibilities for American writing.”
The prize, given by musicians Alyssa and Douglas Graham, seeks to champion innovation, and aims to support the second prose project of an under-recognized writer.
“With this prize, we were looking for writers who stretched our own understanding, as readers, of what writing could be,” Alyssa and Douglas Graham said in a statement. “We were thrilled by the depth of originality across the entire applicant pool, with these five finalists rising to the top with projects that challenged our ideas about literature, while also wowing us with their writing and their distinctive visions.”
Here are the five finalists, chosen a pool of from 166 applications:
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells, won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing, and was shortlisted for the Ursula Le Guin Prize for Fiction, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Collection. She earned her B.A. at Cornell University and her M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wellesley College and the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black writers. She is currently working on her second book, Godsflower, an Afrosurrealist postcolonial fable set in New Zimbabwe, a fictional country haunted by its resurrected dictator. This project uses the narrative structure of Ngano (Zimbabwean fabulism) to chronicle the absurdities of living under an authoritarian regime while also imagining a world in which these regimes fall.
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya is a fiction and architecture writer living in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the novel The Holy Days of Gregorio Pasos. His work has also appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Offing, Forever Magazine, Electric Literature, Triangle House Review, and Joyland. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Rodrigo is currently at work on his second novel, Bruto, an incisive psychological portrayal of a retired Spanish fútbol manager amid personal ruin. With this project, he seeks to interrogate legacies of masculinity through the lens of sport and psychology, as well as chronicle the overlapping ways in which identity, family, and nation are continuously forged.
Mairead Small Staid
Mairead Small Staid is the author of The Traces: An Essay. Her work has been published by The Believer, The Paris Review, and The Sewanee Review, among others, and has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and the George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy. She is at work on a second book of nonfiction, Twice Written: A Marriage in Eight Translations, which considers the word faithfulness as it appears in translation, religion, and marriage, that co-authored text.
Eric Dean Wilson
Eric Dean Wilson is the author of After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort. Wilson’s writing has appeared in The Baffler, Esquire, Time, Orion, and BOMB, among other publications. He is Assistant Professor of creative writing and American literature at Wagner College. His current book-in-progress, Queer Woods: An Essay in Deviance, explores the intersecting crises of democratic space, queer living, and ecological consciousness through the lens of cruising for sex. Beginning with a personal narrative of cruising in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Queer Woods ventures into wider issues: the troubled line between public and private, the status of the “natural” in queer culture, and the right to green space and pleasure under increasingly authoritarian regimes. By interweaving memoir with cultural history, queer ecology, sociology, and art history, the book challenges conventional genre boundaries, combining the erotic with the intellectual. He lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn.
Michael Zapata
Michael Zapata is a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine and the author of the novel The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. He is on the faculty of StoryStudio Chicago and the M.F.A. faculty of Northwestern University. As a public-school educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He currently lives in Chicago, where he is working on The Census Taker, a speculative noir novel that follows the work of a Quechua entomologist in the Amazon and her son, a census taker in Chicago who documents disappeared peoples following a coup. To support the novel, Zapata will partner with AmazonFACE, a conservation and biodiversity organization, to research the devastating impacts of colonization in the Amazon. At its heart, The Census Taker is a love letter to Latinofuturism, indigenous scientists, and revolutionaries.
The winner will be announced in July.
