Ann Arbor, MI—Today, Dzanc Books is pleased to announce Yoke & Feather has been recognized as a finalist in the 27th annual Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards.

We are pleased to announce that our annual contests are now open! This year, along with our Prize for Fiction and Short Story Collection Prize, we’re also offering a Nonfiction Prize. All prize-winners receive publication by Dzanc Books for the following year as well as an advance.

“Parker’s narrative crackles and swirls, spinning in surprising directions, landing with a totally unexpected impact.” —Lit Hub

Russell Persson’s These Threads Who Lead to Bramble defies the singularity of any one genre as it braids together memory and myth to challenge the limits of our collective imagination

“Jonathan Fink pours his stories onto the page. Personal pieces, with himself as the subject, and pieces that tell the stories of others come together to form a collection of intelligent poems, both revealing of the individual self and the larger social picture in which we live.” — World Literature Today

Ann Arbor—Dzanc Books is pleased to announce it has been approved by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for a Grants for Arts Projects award of $21,250.

"Good people suffer terrible injustices when war reasserts tribal loyalties. ... A sad, and sadly still relevant, history lesson in fictional form.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“A deep and powerful work of literary climate fiction… Farah Ali’s is a fresh voice in fiction, a voice that risks and rewards the reader with a deeper understanding of their own condition. Her scope is global but also deeply personal…. An outstanding addition to what I hope is a long-lasting and prolific career.”

—Independent Book Review

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize: Entomology of the Pin-Up Girl by Lauren Osborn. In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2026, the prize also comes with a $2,500 advance.

It’s been our immense pleasure to read such talented entries this year, and we had a deeply difficult time choosing between them. Below are our short- and longlist honorees.

It’s been our immense pleasure to read such talented entries this year, and we had a deeply difficult time choosing between them. Below are our short- and longlist honorees.

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Dzanc Books Prize Prize: Dispatch from Every Second Guess by Megan Gannon. This year’s finalists were read and evaluated by our guest judges, Keith Taylor (All the Time You Want) and Jonathan Fink (Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart). In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2026, the prize also comes with a $1,000 advance.

It’s been our immense pleasure to read such talented entries this year, and we had a deeply difficult time choosing between them. Below are our short- and longlist honorees.

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction: Shipikisha by Mubanga Kalimamukwento. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Farah Ali (The River, The Town), Chika Unigwe (The Middle Daughter), and Sarah Yahm (Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction.

"Linking seemingly discordant experiences so apt they ring harmonious as playground song, Van Eerden ruminates within the mundane, connecting memories of past loves and losses to moments here and gone in a spidery blink, burrowing deep in search of illuminating connections. This moving collection explores the poetry only found in meditation on our deepest longings."

—Southern Literary Review

We’re very excited to share that Afabwaje Kurian’s debut novel, Before the Mango Ripens received a longlist mention for the Aspen Words Literary Prize! The Aspen Words Literary Prize is an annual award for an influential work of fiction that illuminates a vital contemporary issue and demonstrates the transformative power of literature on thought and culture.

We’re so honored that Dzanc Books is one of the recipients of the MACC Operational Support Grant! Thank you very much to The Michigan Arts and Cultural Council and that National Endowment of Arts for your generous support, we are extremely grateful.

"In the emotive, deeply loving, and sometimes erotic pages of Tara Isabel Zambrano's collection Ruined a Little when We Are Born, we meet a talking orgasm with star dust in her edges, a girl who grows extra hands when her mother dies, a skinny boy who makes love to the Devil, thirsty ghosts. In these stories, whole lives, marriages, births, deaths, and afterlifes unfold in the words and blank spaces of just a few pages. The stories build on one another - sensory, sensual, pulsing with life and color -- leaving the reader breathless and starstruck by the wildly inventive twists of Zambrano's vibrant prose." –Alex DiFrancesco, author of Transmutation

“BEFORE THE MANGO RIPENS is one of those rare novels that seems to capture the whole world between its covers. Afabwaje Kurian choreographs and cross-cuts among so many elements of language and beliefs, cultures and histories, and she does so on so many scales—from the individual to the familial, the communal to the national, and to the marvelously cosmic as well—and she does all that with such clear-eyed artfulness, elegance, and seriousness, that no summary or paraphrase can approach an adequate description of its riches. Just turn to page one and start reading."— Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize Award winning author of TINKERS

“The people in these stories need Meg Pokrass. Their lives are tough but her imagination is the fire-lasso that can save them, save us.” –Bob Hicok, author of Elegy Owed and Sex & Love