Chautauqua Literary Arts and the Department of Education at Chautauqua Institution are pleased to announce 10 finalists for the 2026 Chautauqua Janus Prize. To be awarded this summer for the ninth time, the Janus Prize has enjoyed a steady increase in interest among emerging writers, and for 2026 saw another record-breaking number of submissions.  

This year, 281 writers entered work to be considered for the Janus Prize, an annual award that seeks to celebrate an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imaginations.  

The 10 finalists for the 2026 Janus Prize and their works are:  

Marguerite Alley, “Dogsbody” 

Andres Cordoba, “Animals in the Forgotten Room” 

Bryan Thomas Daly, “Essays in Three Lines” 

KaToya Ellis Fleming, “Wild Horses” 

Anaïs Godard, “Elsewhere” 

Isha Karki, “The Girl, The Woman, The Ghost” 

Nicole Khamooshi, “The Midwife of Tohid Blvd (formerly Kennedy)” 

Hassaan Mirza, “Name, Place, Animal, Thing” 

Frances Ogamba, “The Making” 

Christina Trujillo, “Choices” 

An independent jury of readers celebrated the inventive forms and genre-bending work of writers such as Bryan Thomas Daly, whose piece, “Essays in Three Lines,” explores the experience of growing up queer through “piercing images laden with emotion.” Hassaan Mirza takes on a word game as story structure in “Name, Place, Animal, Thing,” to examine innocence and family in the life of a Pakistani woman exploring her identity beyond being a wife and mother. In “Animals in the Forgotten Room,” by Andres Cordoba, memory, trauma, and ambition take center stage within a steam-of-consciousness narrative that one reader called “poetic, rhythmic, and full of a sense of immediacy.”  

As a central component of the Chautauqua Janus Prize, readers sought out compelling portrayals of our interlinked pasts, presents, and futures. One such work, Nicole Khamooshi’s short story “The Midwife of Tohid Blvd (formerly Kennedy),” “speaks from a past moment but births a new perspective” in “visceral, lyric” prose. These temporal, non-linear narratives tied together traditional origin stories, historical perspectives, modern experience, and future imaginings. Frances Ogamba’s otherworldly tale “The Making” ties together a woman’s struggle with infertility and the living, active role of spiritual traditions and ancestors in our lives. Christina Trujillo’s “Choices” powerfully examines the life of an immortal being, using that lens to underscore the profound weight and lasting consequences of every choice we make. In “Elsewhere,” Anaïs Godard interweaves three timelines—a concentration camp in 1943, a student resisting book bans in 2025 Texas, and a woman surviving a dystopian 2107—to reveal how others’ choices reverberate across time and shape our own stories. 

Finally, within this year’s list of finalists, the independent jury of readers lauded works of exquisite character-building and unexpected place-writing. Readers called KaToya Ellis Fleming’s short story “Wild Horses” “a masterclass in how dialogue builds characters.” In a beautifully layered narrative that one reader called “sharp and humorous,” Marguerite Alley’s “Dogsbody” reckons with the intersections of class, age, education, and sexuality during a queer couple’s vacation. The fragmented tale “The Girl, The Woman, The Ghost,” by Isha Karki, shakes the reader from the very first lines with a “striking opening” and curiously interwoven “folktale logic” that is “told freshly and with piercing vulnerability.”

The guest judge for the 2026 Chautauqua Janus Prize is Deborah Miranda, an award-winning writer, scholar, and enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation in California. The author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, four poetry collections, and co-editor of the Lambda finalist Sovereign Erotics: An Anthology of Two-Spirit Literature, Miranda will select a winner from these 10 finalists to be announced in May. Miranda will also be the resident faculty poet for the Chautauqua Writers’ Center Aug. 10–14 (Week Seven) — the same week this year’s prize is to be awarded. The winner will be honored at the 2026 Chautauqua Janus Prize Ceremony, set for 4 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 12, in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor on the grounds of the Institution. 

Still in its youth, 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, the 2018 (and inaugural) Janus Prize winner Nicole Cuffy saw her newest novel, O’ Sinners (One World 2025) named a finalist for the Westpoint Prize for Literature. Additionally, her debut novel Dances (One World 2023) was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. The 2022 Janus Prize winner, Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos, has created her own small publishing imprint, Janus Point Press, which just published her debut novel, To Love Like Venus, in March 2026. 

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. The collection 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.  

“Since its launch in 2018, the Chautauqua Janus Prize has highlighted emerging voices and vital literary innovation, work that remains essential and exciting,” said Stephine Hunt, Chautauqua’s interim Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts. “It has been an honor to support our generous donors’ vision and give writers a platform from which to launch their literary careers.”  

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 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 learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue.  

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