Winner of the 2023 AWP Small Press Publisher Award

We’re honored to announce that Dzanc Books has been honored as winner of the 2023 AWP Small Press Publisher Award! This is an annual prize given each year to nonprofit presses and literary journals in recognition of the labor, creativity, resourcefulness, and innovation of small publishers.

Michelle Dotter, Dzanc’s editor-in-chief, said of the prize: “This is deeply humbling, all the more so because we were nominated for this award by our authors. There can be no greater honor than knowing they’re proud to call Dzanc home.”

Dotter added, “I’ve been with the press for about ten years. When I took this job, I took it for the same reasons a lot of us in publishing end up where we are: because I was broke and had to pay my rent. It took me a while to understand what I’d stumbled on: an independent, nonprofit press devoted to thorny, difficult, brilliant, rule-breaking literature. Thanks to founders Steve Gillis and Dan Wickett, indefatigable champions, Dzanc has remained a press that publishes books because they deserve to be published, not because they’re written to the market. In an increasingly market-driven industry, that’s something worth celebrating.”

At its founding, Dzanc Books was hailed as “the future of publishing” in Publishers Weekly in December 2007. Beginning with modest goals of publishing four to six titles each year, the house now publishes between ten to fifteen books annually. Notable and award-winning authors include Charles Johnson (National Book Award), Lindsey Drager (Shirley Jackson Award winner, Lambda Literary Award finalist), Chaya Bhuvaneswar (PEN/Bingham Award finalist), Josip Novakovich (finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize), and Lee Martin (Pulitzer Prize finalist).

In the thirteen years since its founding, Dzanc has published over 224 original works, including 87 works by debut authors. We’ve restored more than 290 titles that were either out of print or unavailable through the Dzanc rEprint series. In 2011, Dzanc Books also founded the Disquiet International Literary Program, a two-week annual workshop in Lisbon, Portugal. Past guests of honor and instructors include Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, Denis Johnson, Sam Lipsyte, and Tayari Jones. The press is also working to establish a Dzanc writing residency in Greenfield, MA, and a low-cost Dzanc Mentorship Program for aspiring writers.

Dotter concluded, “For so many of us in small press publishing, the work we do is a passion project. It’s work that takes a lot out of you, but it gives a lot back as well. And it means a great deal to be recognized by this larger community of people who believe in the same things.”

Short- and Long-List Honorees for the 2022 Short Story Collection Prize

It was our honor to read and review hundreds of submissions from countless talented authors for this year’s Short Story Collection Prize. Though narrowing them down was a nearly impossible task, we’re proud to celebrate these works as the short- and longlist honorees.

Short Story Collection Prize Shortlist:

Escape Velocity - Ellen Rhudy

Ace Annunciation - Trudy Lewis

The Mexican Messiah: A Novella and Stories - Jay Kauffmann

These Worn Bodies - K.B. Carle

The Consolations of Space - Hillery Hugg

WHEN YOU WATCH ME - Elizabeth Searle

Not So Long Ago - Bill Smoot

Messages - Mary Kuryla

The Mercy of Others - Kent Nelson

Looking for Ezekiel - William Ejzak

I'm So Sorry Babe - Sarah Faulkner

This House and Other Houses - Clark Knowles

We Knew Horses & Other Neo-Noirs - James Miranda

The Local Gods - Mack Marsden

Old School - mary grimm

John & Yoko & Rowena & Me - Shelley Ettinger

Short Story Collection Prize Longlist:

Happily Ever After - L.H. Finigan

Strategies for Being - Kate Barss

Lensballing the Future - Jody Azzouni

Paseos, and Other Stories - Jose M. Martinez

Secret Government - Franklin Schneider

The Normal Force - Molia Dumbleton

Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself - Jill Rosenberg

Departures - Adam Peterson

This is Not Skin - Nathan Roberts

Critical Cartography and Other Stories - Joseph Levens

The Long Swim - Terese Svoboda

Broken or Breakable - M. Christine Benner Dixon

House of Horrors - Robert Long Foreman

Outermark, A Linked Collection - Jason Brown

Unusual Poisons - Matthew Pitt

The Continental Divide - Robert Johnson

IF YOU THINK YOUR HEART CAN TAKE IT - Suzanne McConnell

The Olfactorist - Irene Cooper

Michael Jackson in Gaza and Other Stories - Askold Melnyczuk

What Mennonite Girls are Good For - Jennifer Sears

The Empty Castle - L Davenport

Announcing the Winner of the 2022 Short Story Collection Prize

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize: Zan by Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh. In addition to publication by Dzanc in Spring 2024, the prize also comes with a $2,500 advance.

“Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh’s stories are a stunning glimpse into the wide-ranging experiences, lives, and viewpoints of the women of Iran. In sharp and gorgeous prose, these stories encompass vast and varied perspectives, yet all tackle the idea of our commonalities and how these women rise and bloom into their own complex, resilient selves,” said Dan Wickett, Dzanc’s co-founder and founder of the Emerging Writers Network.

Ehtesham-Zadeh said of the collection, “Taken together, the stories in Zan present a portrait of the Iranian woman as resourceful, resilient, determined, and unstoppable. This portrait is drawn from my own experiences as part of a large, woman-heavy Iranian family and inspired by the many powerful Iranian women I know. The collection was completed before the current uprising began in Iran, but it is a tribute to the courageous women who are part of that movement.”

Ehtesham-Zadeh grew up in Tehran during the final years of the Shah’s regime, moved to the United States to attend university, returned to Iran at the dawn of the Islamic Revolution, and later resided for several years in Spain. While she has spent significant chunks of her life in Europe and Iran, her permanent home is a mini-farm she owns in Woodstock, Georgia. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Fiction International, Glassworks Magazine, Quiddity International Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

The Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing. Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization not only committed to producing quality literary works but providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors. Dzanc Books also runs annual prizes for the novel and nonfiction. For more information on the house, upcoming titles, and other prize winners, please visit www.dzancbooks.org.

Short- and Long-List Honorees for the 2022 Prize for Fiction

It was our honor to read and review hundreds of submissions from countless talented authors for this year’s Prize for Fiction. Though narrowing them down was a nearly impossible task, we’re proud to honor these works as the Prize for Fiction short- and long-list honorees.

Prize for Fiction Shortlist

Space Junk by Marina Harris

Country of Under by Brooke Shaffner

PLUM by Andy Anderegg

Sunset at Lion Rock by Matthew Wong Foreman

The Occupant by Nick Story

Prize for Fiction Longlist

Churn by Chloe Siem

Seconds Forms by Christine Denkewalter

Controlled Conversations by Karol Lagodzki

Quartet by Matthew Smith

The Moth Orchid by Linda Gorelova

Condition Paradise Now by Kate Hunter

The Invisible Hand by Douglas Cole

The Nurseryman’s Wedding by David Hopes

Of Rivers and Dreams by Fayeza Hasanat

The Dissection by Samuel Ashworth

Wallpaper by Kayla Blatchley

June Variations by Hayden Casey

Thermidor by Corley Miller

We Walked On by Therese Chehade

This Is Not My Home by Danielle Wolffe

These Hearts May Explode by Vish Khanna

Atalanta by Kirsten Lunstrum

Six Months of Winter by Michael Larson

Soldiers and Jungles by Martin Naparsteck

Cadenza by Justin Courter

The Worst Kind of Girl by Susan Rukeyser

Meanwhile by Amalia Gladhart

Announcing the Winner of the Prize for Fiction

Dzanc Books is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction: The Banana Wars by Alan Grostephan. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Josip Novakovich (Rubble of Rubles, Honey in the Carcase), Angel Khoury (Between Tides), and Blair Austin (Dioramas), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction.

Centered on a period of violence in Urabá, Colombia, in the 1990s, when Colombian and American banana producers financed right-wing paramilitaries to cleanse the zone of guerrillas and their supposed collaborators, The Banana Wars follows the lives of four characters pulled into different sides of the conflict. Austin says of the manuscript,

“This is a searing account of the ongoing consequences of colonial power structures in Colombia. What strikes me about The Banana Wars is the keen, journalistic eye and the refusal to look away from the lives and power struggles of everyday people—guerillas, paramilitary soldiers, sex workers, plantation owners and their backers overseas—all of whom are trapped in a brutal system of exploitation and madness.”

Alan Grostephan is the author of Bogotá, a novel chosen by the Wall Street Journal as one of the best ten books of fiction in 2013 and longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. He is also the editor and translator of Stories of Life and Death, a collection of writing by emerging Colombian writers. Grostephan said of winning the prize:

“I set out to write a simple novel, a deathbed confession by an American banana executive. As I researched and developed the book, traveling frequently to Urabá, Colombia, where it is set, everything became much more complex. The history of bananas—where they come from, who plants them, who makes money from them—and why this business is so violent turned my book into a larger drama about people at every level of the trade. People who would never meet in real life, but could share the pages of the book and coexist in a reader’s mind. I am grateful to Dzanc, the perfect home for this book, for understanding and embracing it.”

The Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction was created to recognize daring, original, and innovative writing. Dzanc Books is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization not only committed to producing quality literary works but providing creative writing instruction in public schools through the Dzanc Writers-in-Residence program, and offering low-cost workshops for aspiring authors. For more information, please visit www.dzancbooks.org