Book Prize winners ruling their worlds with groundbreaking works
When we started the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize two decades ago, we aimed to, among other things, celebrate literary excellence and provide a launch pad for writers, especially emerging ones facing the grueling world of publishing.
Each year, when we celebrate new winners, we look back with enormous pride at how previous winners continue to prove our judges right by taking the literary world by storm. As the current submission for this year’s Book Prize closes on March 15, 2025, we look at the upcoming and recent works of our previous winners, some making inroads and charting new paths in genres different from the ones in which they won the Book Prize.
In January, Aria Aber released her debut novel, Good Girl. The novel, which has been long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, follows Nila, a 19-year-old artist and daughter of Afghan refugees, as she navigates Berlin’s underground art and music scene. Aria Aber was the 2018 Book Prize winner for her debut poetry collection, Hard Damage, which also won a 2020 Whiting Award.
March appears to be the busiest month for our previous Book Prize winners. The 2017 Book Prize winner in poetry, Luisa Muradyan, released her poetry collection, I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated, on March 3, 2025. This work delves into themes of love, grief, hope, and longing across generations and continents, particularly focusing on the devastation in Ukraine.
Xhenet Aliu, who won the 2012 Book Prize for her short story collection Domesticated Wild Things, is set to release her novel Everybody Says It’s Everything on March 18, 2025, from Penguin Random House. In this page-turner, Xhenet takes readers on a historical journey as “twins growing up in the United States in the nineties unravel larger truths about identity and sibling bonds when one of them gets wrapped up in the war in Kosovo.”
Dustin M. Hoffman’s short stories collection, Such A Good Man, will be released by the University of Wisconsin Press in March 2025. He won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction.
Megan Cummins’ debut novel Atomic Hearts is forthcoming on August 5, 2025, from Ballantine Books. Her short story collection, If the Body Allows, won the 2019 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction.
Jihyun Yun’s debut young adult novel, And the River Drags Her Down, will be published by Knopf Books for Young Readers (US) and Rock the Boat (UK) in the fall of 2025. She previously won the Book Prize for her poetry collection Some Are Always Hungry.
Jennifer (JP) Perrine will release her fifth poetry collection, Beautiful Outlaw, in 2025, winner of the 2023 QTBIPOC Prize; while R. A. Villanueva’s forthcoming poetry collection, A Holy Dread, winner of the 2024 Alice James Award, will be released by Alice James Books in February 2026.
Among our previous winners with recent publications is Jesse Lee Kercheval, who won the 2006 Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction with her collection The Alice Stories. Her graphic Memoir, French Girl, was published by Fieldmouse Press in September 2024.
Other recent publications include Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, which was published by MCD in January 2024, and Amina Gautier’s short story collection The Best That You Can Do, which was published in 2024 by Soft Skull Press.