Chautauqua Literary Arts and the Department of Education at Chautauqua Institution are pleased to announce 11 finalists for the 2025 Chautauqua Janus Prize. To be awarded this summer for the eighth time, the Janus Prize has enjoyed a steady increase of interest among emerging writers and this year saw another record-breaking number of submissions.  

This year, 210 writers entered work to be considered for the prize that looks to celebrate an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imagination.  

The 11 finalists for the 2025 Janus Prize and their works are:  

• Eva Allison, “Dear Harper” 
• Hunter A. Allund, “Your Very Own Sun” 
• Stefan Bindley-Taylor, “Bread, Meat, and Water” 
• Sarah Rose Cadorette, “Museum of Hurt” 
• Jai Dulani, “An essay on shadows, in alphabetical form” 
• Tiffany Fritz, “North American Union v. Exergy-Petroline Corporation” 
• Aziza Kasumov, “World’s Best Ex-Girlfriend” 
• Jason Lipeles, “In the Beginning…” 
• Vivian Montgomery, “Four People Who Remember Sally Shilton” 
• Kelan Nee, “Irrigation” 
• Daniel Uncapher, “Smouldering Fagots” 

Readers were thrilled to see stories reconstituting the language and narratives that shape our daily lives from these emerging writers. Tiffany Fritz’s fictional work, “North American Union v. Exergy-Petroline Corporation,” takes the form of a Supreme Court decision, examining a distant future Earth still struggling with the drastic impacts of climate change we’re witnessing today. Daniel Uncapher’s piece, “Smouldering Fagots,” is an amalgamated narrative pulling together portions of texts from the 19th and 20th centuries that, as one reader noted, “illustrates how deep, close reading can shape a person” in a world where artificial intelligence can only superficially echo such sentiment. In a short story by Aziza Kasumov, “World’s Best Ex-Girlfriend,” we meet a character seeking solace from the loneliness and alienation of this world through conversations with AI chatbots. 

Through thoughtful examinations of our shared human condition in her story “Dear Harper,” Eva Allison offers, as a reader stated, an “authentic depiction of grief” in an epistolary piece written from the perspective of a young woman addressing her deceased twin sister. In “Museum of Hurt,” Sarah Cadorette “investigates the role of social media in our felt obligations to make public, virtual statements about private pain,” a reviewer said. Similarly, Kelan Nee’s “Irrigation” interrogates a young man’s experiences with hypermasculinity, alcoholism, and his relationship with his deceased father while he literally digs into the world around him to build irrigation systems. Hunter A. Allund’s short story “Your Very Own Sun” humorously considers the erasure of the self within the corporate world and the resulting surreal, disconnectedness stemming from careers that necessitate immediate connectivity today.  

Readers called Jason Lipeles’ “In the Beginning…” a work of “subversive form” that reflects on the conception of humanity and “queerness at the inception of life” in vulnerable, honest prose that “ricochets across a newly mapped theory of existence.” In what has been noted as a “beautiful disjunctive portrait of the trans experience,” Jai Dulani shares a journey of self-discovery and self-creation in “An essay on shadows, in alphabetical form.” Vivian Montgomery’s work “Four People Who Remember Sally Shilton,” challenges our perceptions of what it means to be remembered and the staying power of the written word. Finally, in a story balancing “humor and levity with poignancy,” as expressed by a reviewer, Stefan Bindley-Taylor shares a distinctly and beautifully portrayed Caribbean narrative full of ghostly memory and aspirations in “Bread, Meat, and Water.” 

Award-winning author and educator Marita Golden is the guest judge for this year’s Janus Prize. The author of 10 works of fiction and nonfiction and co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Golden will select a winner from these 11 finalists to be announced in May. Golden will also be the Week Seven prose resident faculty writer for the Chautauqua Writers’ Center — the same week this year’s prize is to be awarded. The winner will be honored at the 2025 Chautauqua Janus Prize Ceremony, set for 5 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 8, in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor on the grounds of the Institution. 

Still in its infancy, the prize’s reach and influence have grown beyond the Institution’s gates as the honored emerging writers make their names in the literary world — and the list of accolades for previous winners and finalists is growing. Most recently, Joseph Earl Thomas’ debut novel God Bless You Otis Spunkmeyer was published by Grand Central Publishing in June 2024 and was longlisted for the ALA Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and won the 2024 First Novel Prize from The Center for Fiction. This follows his debut memoir, Sink, published in February 2023 from Grand Central Publishing. That book — an evolution of his 2020 Janus Prize-winning piece “Reality Marble” — was a New York Times Editor’s pick and received praise from The Washington Post, Vulture, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Publishers Weekly, among others.  

Also noteworthy is Jonathan Escoffery, a three-time finalist for the prize, who published his debut short story collection If I Survive You with MacMillan in September 2022, which was a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award and nominated for the 2022 Nation Book Award, the 2022 National Book Critics Circles John Leonard Prize, the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Open Book Award, the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, to name a few. Additionally, the 2018 (and inaugural) prize winner Nicole Cuffy’s debut novel Dances, from One World, was published in May 2023 and was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her most recent novel, O Sinners! was published by One World in March 2025.  

“Since its inception and inaugural award in 2018, the Chautauqua Janus Prize has celebrated emerging voices and exciting developments within the literary world, which unquestionably remains important and thrilling work,” said Stephine Hunt, Chautauqua’s managing director of literary arts. “It has been an honor to support the founders’ visions of this prize and to provide a space at Chautauqua from which these writers can successfully propel themselves into the literary scene.”  

ABOUT THE CHAUTAUQUA JANUS PRIZE  
Awarded annually since 2018, the Chautauqua Janus Prize celebrates an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives and readers’ imaginations. In addition to receiving a $5,000 award and a travel stipend, the winner gives a lecture on the grounds during the summer season. Named for Janus, the Roman god who looks to both the past and the future, the prize honors writing with a command of craft that renovates our understandings of both. The prize is funded by a generous donation from Barbara, Hilary and Twig Branch. More information can be found at janus.chq.org.  

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA LITERARY ARTS 
With a history steeped in the literary arts, Chautauqua Institution is the home of the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, which honors at least nine outstanding books of fiction, nonfiction, essays and poetry with community discussions and author presentations every summer. Further literary arts programs at Chautauqua include the annual Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference, which convenes writers in workshops, panels, and other conversations that draw fruitful and urgent connections between the personal, the political and the craft of writing, as well as the summer-long workshops, craft lectures and readings from some of the very best author-educators in North America at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center. 

ABOUT CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION  
Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer — and year-round through the CHQ Assembly online platforms — with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue.  

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