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.

2025 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction Winner for Executrix

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W. W. Norton), which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (Slapering Hol Press). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. New work may be found or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches creative writing at Endicott College.

Photo Credit: Marco Giugliarelli

2025 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry Winner for retrovirology
 
John Bonanni is a Cape Cod–based writer who serves as founding editor of the Cape Cod Review. His poems have appeared in Foglifter, Black Warrior Review, Southern Indiana Review, Washington Square Review, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Gulf Coast, and his literary criticism has been featured in DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, and The Kenyon Review. He is the recipient of scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and residencies from AS220 and the John Hay Writing Studio. His research on poetry as an intervention for writing attitudes among learners with severe disabilities can be found in The Graduate Review (Bridgewater State University), and his chapbook, a rotary phone that dings when you move it (Cape Cod Editions), was funded by a matching grant from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod and the National Endowment for the Arts, before the NEA was gutted by neofascism. 

Photo Credit: John Hay

2025 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction Winner for 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.

Photo Credit: L. Godwin

2025 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel Winner for Have You Seen Romit?


Chital Mehta was born and raised in India, where she experimented with writing YA novels. Her short stories have appeared in The Pinch, Oyez Review, SLAB magazine, and elsewhere. Her story “Damaged Gifts” won the SLAB fiction contest in 2022. Her work was a finalist for the 2022 Pinch Literary Award. Her stories center around displacement and belonging. She holds an MFA from Lindenwood University. She lives in Delaware with her husband and children, where she is working on her next novel and a collection of short stories based on Asian immigrant themes. She can be reached at ChitalMehtaJey.com.

Photo Credit: JP


Kenyatta Rogers is a Cave Canem fellow and has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has also been nominated multiple times for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. His work has been previously published in Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta, PANK, and MAKE Magazine, among others. Rogers is a lead teacher for the Poetry Foundations Teacher Institute and Chautauqua Institution’s Young Writer Institute. He is a cohost of the Sunday Reading Series with Simone Muench and serves on the creative writing faculty at the Chicago High School for the Arts.