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New Letters is pleased to announce the winners of the 2024 New Letters Literary Awards. Winners
received a cash prize of $2,500 and will be published in the winter/spring 2024 issue of New Letters.
Photo Credits: Traci Brimhall photo by Collin McMillian
First Runner-Up: AT Hincapie, “The Mandela Effect & Other Poems”
Sébastien Luc Butler was born and raised in Michigan. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow in poetry, and served as poetry editor for Meridian. Recipient of the Hopwood Award for Poetry, Sébastien has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Levis Book Prize, and the Black Warrior Review Contest. He was also longlisted for the Gregory Djanikian Scholars in Poetry by Adroit. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Narrative Magazine, Pleiades, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, The Greensboro Review, Southeast Review, the minnesota review, Four Way Review, Post Road Magazine, Cream City Review, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. He serves as an assistant editor at West Trade Review, and lives in New York City.
Traci Brimhall is a university distinguished professor of creative writing and narrative medicine at Kansas State University. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). Known for her poems that often marry the ordinary with the surreal, Brimhall’s work has appeared widely in journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, Orion, The New Republic, Poetry, The Nation, and The New York Times Magazine. Through fellowships with the National Endowment of the Arts, National Parks Service, and Academy of American Poets she’s taught writing workshops in farm schools, art museums, libraries, medical communities, and the outdoors. She’s also received a Karnes Fellowships through Purdue Library’s Special Collections to study the lost poem drafts of Amelia Earhart. She is the poet laureate of Kansas.
Elisabetta La Cava is a double immigrant born in Italy and raised in Venezuela who became a Texan some years ago. She is an MFA candidate at Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Stone Canoe, The Pointed Circle, Hispanic Culture Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, and others. She lives in Austin. “Not Your Cinema Paradiso” is an excerpt from a longer work in progress. You can find her online at www.elisabettalacava.com.
Jason Brown is a fiction and nonfiction writer. He was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is a professor and the Director of the MFA Program. He has published three books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House), Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic), and A Faithful But Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, published in the fall of 2019 as part of the short fiction series by Missouri Review Books. His stories and essays have won several awards and appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories, The L.A. Times, The Guardian, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Missouri Review, and other venues. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Jason’s third book of stories won the Maine Literary Prize for Fiction and an Independent Publisher Book Award. In the fall of 2024 a novel called Outermark will be published by Paul Dry Books, and in 2025 a memoir called Character Witness will be published by the American Lives Series.
Tanya Pengelly is a Welsh writer living in Warwickshire, England. She holds a PhD in creative writing and the narratology of friendship, and has a great interest in traditional performance storytelling. Her fiction strays between literary psychological fiction and speculative fiction, but is always rooted in how the landscape around us informs the stories we tell ourselves. Tanya was a finalist for both the Rhys Davies Short Story Award and the Driftwood Press Short Story Contest in 2024, and her stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary magazines. You can find her at www.tanyapengelly.com.
Rebecca Lee is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. She is the author of Bobcat and Other Stories (2012) and The City is a Rising Tide (2006). Lee won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2012 and the National Magazine Award in 2001.
Roy Bentley, Leia Bradley, Paula Brancato, Sebastien Butler, AT Hincapie, Matt Hohner, L. A. Johnson, J. Khan, Sarah Matsui,
Fleming Meeks, Stacy Nigliazzo, Michael O’Ryan, Maria Rouphail, Sonya Schneider, Lindsey Wayland
Isabel Choi, Adam Davis, Susan Haar, Karin Jones, Somi Jun, Elisabetta La Cava, Keya Lloyd, Margot Parmenter, Stephen Policoff
Lesley Bannatyne, Paul Byall, Margaret Campbell, Adrienne Elder, JR Fenn, Eliza Gilbert, Molly Gorevan, Casey Gray, Anoop Judge,
Aren LeBrun, Tanya Pengelly, Eric Schlich, Allen Shadow, Faith Shearin
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