Emerging Writer to Give Lecture, Reading of Winning Work on Aug. 8 

In another record-breaking year for submissions, Chautauqua Institution is delighted to announce “Bread, Meat, and Water” by Stefan Bindley-Taylor as the winner of the 2025 Chautauqua Janus Prize.  

“Bread, Meat, and Water” was selected from 11 finalists as the winner by this year’s guest judge Marita Golden, who described the short story as one that illustrates “a world in which everything is changing all at once and all the time, challenging and reshaping values, and dreams even as the foundational impulses that connect us as humans prevail.” 

As the 2025 prize recipient, Bindley-Taylor will receive $5,000, plus travel and lodging for a week’s writing residency at Chautauqua Institution this summer. He will give a public lecture and reading at a celebratory event at 5 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 8, in the parlor of the Athenaeum Hotel as part of Chautauqua Institution’s 2025 Summer Assembly.  

Bindley-Taylor is a Trinidadian American author born and raised in Maryland. His stories balance absurdism, surrealism and real emotion to showcase characters from the Caribbean diaspora through a nuanced, humorous and empathetic lens — as is the case in “Bread, Meat, and Water,” which Golden described as a “haunting, deeply human story … about love and death, family and family fracture, a father’s love and a husband’s bond, and love beyond the grave, beyond time.”  

Golden noted the “deceptive elegance and simplicity” of the voice that narrates the story. It is a voice, she said, “disembodied but full of life. A voice that remembers and forgives and hurts and heals. It is the sound of the kind of voice that pulls you to the last word.” 

Bindley-Taylor said he was “immensely honored” by the Janus Prize, and grateful for Golden’s remarks. He too highlighted the importance of voice in “Bread, Meat, and Water.” 

“It is a joy and a challenge to try and showcase the complexities and nuances of Caribbean dialect through my work,” he said, “and I’m thankful to Chautauqua for opening space for authors seeking to push the boundaries of language and explore writing based in dialect and patois.”  

The success of Bindley-Taylor’s writing is in how he “weaves the magical sound of the irony and wit of Caribbean patois with shining, shimmering lyricism to create a language perfect for the world that this story creates,” Golden said. “The impressive structure of this story is hidden within a pitch-perfect architecture of words and meaning that will live for readers as a gift.” Ultimately, said Managing Director of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt, “Bread, Meat, and Water” is “a short story that embodies the innovation that the Chautauqua Janus Prize seeks to celebrate and uplift. ‘Bread, Meat, and Water’ expertly blends poignant humor and the ghostly dreams and memories that bring individuals, families and cultures together. It is a poetic celebration of the abundance and impact of a single human life.” 

“Bread, Meat, and Water” was one of 210 entries for this year’s Janus Prize, which has seen a record-breaking number of submissions each year it has been awarded. Bindley-Taylor said he was thankful for the work done by readers and prize administrators, and was “grateful to have been among such a talented group of finalists.” 

Bindley-Taylor’s short story was chosen from a collection of 11 finalists — works that were bold, audacious and provocative,” Golden said, that serve as a “testimony to the resilience and necessity of stories as inspiration and challenge.” 

“The narratives chosen for consideration for the 2025 Chautauqua Janus Prize were a dazzling array of stories that showcased some of the best work of today’s writers of fiction and nonfiction,” she said. “American storytelling rests in good hands.” 

A writer, musician and educator, Bindley-Taylor has had work published in several outlets including Adda, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York CaribNews. He is the winner of the 2025 DISQUIET Flowers Fellowship and the 2024 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival Prize, a short-lister for the 2024 Commonwealth Foundation Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the PEN 2023 Emerging Voices Fellowship. He currently splits his time between New York City and Virginia, and is pursuing his MFA at the University of Virginia. For more than a decade, Bindley-Taylor has also been a performing musician; currently, he writes and performs in a punk project called FISHLORD and an alternative hip-hop project called Nafets. He has amassed over 8 million streams worldwide between the two projects and landed sync placements with Netflix, HBO, Hulu, BET+, The CW and more. 

Golden, who will be a Writers’ Center Resident Faculty Writer this summer, is an award-winning author of over 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. Her books include the novels The Wide Circumference of Love, and After, and the memoirs Migrations of the Heart, Saving Our Sons, and Don’t Play in the Sun: One Woman’s Journey Through the Color Complex. Her most recent work of nonfiction is The New Black Woman: Loves Herself, Has Boundaries, Heals Every Day, a sequel to her book The Strong Black Woman: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women. In February 2025, Mango Publishing released How to Become a Black Writer: Creating and Honoring Black Stories That Matter. A two-time NAACP Image Award nominee, Golden has received the Writers for Writers Award presented by Barnes & Noble; Poets and Writers, an award from the Authors Guild; and the Fiction Award for her novel After, awarded by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is co-founder and president emerita of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, and has taught at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and has served as a member of the faculties at George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Johns Hopkins University. 

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 and appears in a forthcoming issue of the literary journal Chautauqua. 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. Eligible short prose that is either unpublished or published after Jan. 31, 2024, will be accepted as submissions for the 2025 prize beginning this fall. More information can be found at chq.org/janus.   

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 Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference, which convenes writers each June 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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