Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction

Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction: $5,500 and publication by Mad Creek Books, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press.

2026 Judge

Weike Wang is the author of Chemistry (Knopf, 2017), Joan Is Okay (Random House, 2022), and Rental House (Riverhead, 2024). She is the recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award, a Whiting Award, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and The Best American Short Stories and has won an O. Henry Prize. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Barnard College, and Boston University.

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2025 Winner

Winner: Adam Peterson
Gospels

Adam Peterson’s fiction has appeared in EPOCH, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Nebraska, he now lives in Los Angeles and can be found online at AdamPeterson.net.

Kevin Wilson, judge: “As history tends to shave off the weird bumps and ridges of our past, it’s exhilarating and unsteadying to read a collection that ambitiously seeks to provide a kind of bizarro reimagining of our world. Gospels is odd and hilarious and yet so tenderly human, so unafraid of cataloging all the strange desires and cruelties and moments of true connection that have somehow gotten us to this moment in time, and then it rockets beyond that to imagine an even stranger future. This is wildness of the highest order, unforgettable and highly original.”

Runner-up: Helen Georgas
INVENTORY

Wilson: “This linked collection spans time and geography in exquisite prose that seeks to uncover the ways in which we are bound to our family history, and all the ways we radically seek to fracture that tidy narrative. Following a family of Greek immigrants running a restaurant in Canada, this collection is insightful and beautiful, even as it plumbs all the ways in which pain is forever passed back and forth between ourselves and the people who made us.”

2025 Finalists

PAGODAS OF THE SUN—JAPAN STORIES by G. S. Arnold
SOFT GOODBYES THROUGH BROKEN VEILS by Clayton Bradshaw-Mittal
NOISE NUISANCE by Trudy Lewis
YOU SHOULD HAVE HELD ME WHEN YOU HAD THE CHANCE by Robert Long Foreman
BESTIAL MOTHERS by Mary Overton
HOW DOES IT BEGIN? by Eugene Radice
A NATURAL HISTORY by Brooke Sahni
WE FIND OUR LIVES IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS by Phillip Sterling

The 2024 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction

Winner: Lesley Bannatyne
Lake Song

Lesley Bannatyne received the 2018 fiction prize from bosque literary journal, the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for fiction and The Ghost Story’s 2020 summer fiction prize. Her debut collection of short stories, Unaccustomed to Grace, was published in 2022 by Kallisto Gaia Press. As a freelance journalist, she covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia, and her most recent nonfiction book, Halloween Nation, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. She lives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Deesha Philyaw, Judge: “Kinder Falls is home to four generations of folks who might consider their lives to be ordinary. Yet in Lake Song, their beautifully told stories are at turns haunting and enchanting, overflowing with delicious details and breathtaking revelations about love, family, grief, desire, progress, regret, revenge, and every other facet of what it means to be fractured and human. This book dazzles and surprises, from line to line, page to page, and decade to decade over the course of these finely wrought characters’ lives.”

Runner-Up: Daphne Chemutai Kiplagat
SMALL STORIES

2024 Finalists

KAINTUCK STORIES by Artie Bates
MONSTERS HERE AND THERE: STORIES by Kate Fitzgerald
A SMALL BUT PERFECT HAPPINESS by Edward Hamlin
HAR MAR SUPERSTAR by Hilal Isler
WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU DONE? by Diane Lefer
HOLE BAG by Jessica Lee Richardson
BAD BABIES by Keya Mitra
THE RIVER ALWAYS RUNS DOWNHILL by Brooke Nelson

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