AWP Awards Reception & Celebration

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, AWP could not exist without the generosity of our members. Admission to this event is complimentary, with a suggested $15 minimum donation to AWP to help us sustain programming and awards and continue serving writers. One free drink ticket per guest and appetizers will be available, as well as a performance by the Cornelius Eady Group. 


2024 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction Winner for unMothered, unTongued

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei and the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50, an NYPL best book of 2019 and a 2020 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her fiction collection, Reveal Codes, won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, and their chapbook, #stringofbeads, was published by Diode Press in 2023. A recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series, Horikoshi Roripaugh has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Story Magazine, and others. Seven of their essays have been listed as notable in The Best American Essays.




2024 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Winner for No Rhododendron
 
Samyak Shertok’s poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. His honors include the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry, the Gulf Coast Prize in Poetry, and the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Nepal, he was the inaugural Hughes Fellow in Poetry at Southern Methodist University and teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University.




2024 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction Winner for Lake Song
 
Lesley Pratt Bannatyne is the author of the short story collection Unaccustomed to Grace as well as fiction and essays in the The Boston Globe, Smithsonian, The Christian Science Monitor, and many literary magazines. Her latest nonfiction book, Halloween Nation, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist. Lake Song is her seventh book.









2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel Winner for Twinless Twin

Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer living in eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughters. His work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, EPOCH, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. Tuck serves on the advisory board for the North Carolina Literary Review and teaches writing at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, North Carolina.







 

CORNELIUS EADY GROUP

National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize–nominated poet Cornelius Eady has set his poetry to song with the Cornelius Eady Group. Eady’s songs tell the story of passing time, the Black American experience, and the blues in the style of folk and Americana music. Guitarists Charlie Rauh and Lisa Liu, along with violinist/vocalist Concetta Abbate, join Eady to create layered and graceful arrangements to bolster Eady’s adept craftsmanship as a songwriter, lyricist, and poet. The Cornelius Eady Group has performed for the Big Ears Festival, Brooklyn Folk Festival, Piccolo Spoleto, PBS Newshour, BBC Radio 4, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, AWP Conference, Peabody Essex Museum, and Hill-Stead Museum, and recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee. Don’t Get Dead, a COVID folk song project, was released by June Appal Recordings in 2021. Their latest, the seven-track EP The Misery Tree (Bandcamp) was released in May 2025.

About their music, author Rick Moody has written:

“The Cornelius Eady Group, with its rangy stew of influences—British folk, country blues, spiritual jazz, soul, spoken word—represents something really new in contemporary music, a return to a time when lyricism and the old purpose of American poetry were at the center of American songwriting.”