Here are the finalists for this year’s $20,000 DAG Prize for Literature.

Today, the DAG Foundation announced the five finalists for the DAG Prize for Literature, which grants $20,000 to “an early-career prose writer whose work expands the possibilities for American writing.” The prize, now in its second year, is given by musicians Alyssa and Douglas Graham (who also award annual prizes to musicians and visual artists), and seeks to champion “significant innovation,” and support the second prose project of an under-recognized writer.

Here are the seven finalists, chosen from a pool of 220 applications, and their bios:

Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer who holds a PhD in Literature andCreative Writing from the University of Southern California, and an MFA in Poetry from California State University, Long Beach. His inter-genre story collection, ¡PÓNK!, was published in 2025. His project, Can I Live?: 13 Afro(Latine) Punk Essays, is a coming-of-age collection of pop-culture criticism and personal narratives traversing the author’s formative years in South Gate, CA, through present day adulthood, navigating the center of being black, Latino, and a punk. Told in a series of fragmented prose and other experimental forms to interrogate race, masculinity, love, media, and the term “afro-punk,” the book asks whether it is the name we are given or the names we need that best answer the question “Can I live?” with an emphatic “Yes!”

Maddie Norris, author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays, is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Davidson College. She earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and recently served as the Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her essays have won the Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction from Ninth Letter and been named Notable in Best American Essays 2020 and 2022. Her work can be found in Guernica, Fourth Genre, and The Normal School, among others. She is at work on The Shape of Nothing That Has Ever Existed: Essays in Praxis, an essay collection that explores how women might move from objects to subjects through subversion and into better relationships with the world around us.

Ali Raz is a fiction writer, essayist, and author of the collaborative poetry project Human Tetris and the novella Alien. Shorter works have appeared in L.A. Review of Books, The Believer, Mid Theory Collective, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. Her current manuscript, The Vanishing String, is a pulpy conspiracy about the global phenomenon of “missing persons” – that catch-all term for runaways and victims of kidnapping, murder, assassination, and political torture that forms the hazy backdrop of contemporary life. When the protagonist of The Vanishing String begins to investigate a friend’s disappearance, they discover that the suspects include not only strangers, friends, lovers, and an ascendant cult/political party called the “Cosmicologists,” but also language itself. For The Vanishing String, “missing persons” is ultimately a problem within language, a point where the hole between words and things reveals itself, becomes corrupted, spits poison.

Mihret Sibhat was born and raised in Ethiopia before moving to California at age 17. Her debut novel, The History of a Difficult Child, won a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. A graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in Creative Writing, she was a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative grant. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, Lit Hub, and Electric Literature. She is currently working on The Door of No Refund, a novel about two men who work in an underground market for human suffering, and an investigation of the relationship between the commodification of victimhood and vanity.

Jefferey Spivey is a St. Louis-based author, poet, and journalist and serves as Editor at Northstar Publishing. His debut story collection, The Birthright of Sons, won the 2023 Iron Horse Book Prize and was longlisted for the 2024 Maya Angelou Book Award. He’s a current MFA candidate in Bennington College’s Writing Seminars, graduating in June 2026. His work has appeared in Rigorous, Evergreen Review, and Typehouse. His novel-in-progress, Fatherwife, is a hybrid work of fiction and poetry that explores loneliness and desire, with a Black queer lens and a pop culture fixation—along two parallel narrative tracks. The “traditional” prose sections follow Irving, a journalist and occasional TV recapper navigating a cool phase (and lack of purpose) in his marriage to Paz. The poem sections reflect a Greek chorus of wives who narrate the history of Irving’s suppressed desires. As the novel progresses, the two tracks collide in unexpected ways.

Tegan Nia Swanson is an artist who explores gender, place, and accountability. Her debut, Things We Found When the Water Went Down, was described as “a polyphonic story of survival and healing” by the Chicago Review of Books. They teach in the anti-violence movement and at Madison College. Her new project, We Do Not Dream of Salt Plagues, is a climate gothic love letter to queer and trans community. It’s 1991 in the North Country – and 1918, and 2038. Rosebud Bigote is House Mother to a cooperative on the Inland Sea. The only resident who knows how to speak to the future, her wisdom ensures their survival. Too bad it’s the past calling on their haunted short-wave radio, and Rosebud is dying of the Salt Plague. She and her old nemesis, Reverend Abelard Boucher, battle across three timelines, illuminating connections between Spiritualism, Satanic Panic, and the insidious doublethink of post-COVID conspiracy.

Sophia Terazawa writes prose, poetry, and performance scores that investigate colonial memory, intergenerational haunting, and the incantatory possibilities of hybrid forms. Her debut novel, Tetra Nova, is a polyvocal text that moves between a mother’s exile from Saigon and a daughter’s reckoning in the American present. She is also the author of three poetry collections. Terazawa is working on her second novel, Curse Him, a surreal and tense autofiction accounting for three summer months of being scammed by psychics in a small Appalachian town. As words have incantatory power to shift elements of fate, as well as matters of the heart, this project calls forward questions around an alleged family curse from Nagasaki and the writing process as its own counter-spell.