Contest and Scholarship Winners

The 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize Winners

DISQUIET International is thrilled to announce the winners in each genre, including one grand prize winner, for our 2023 Literary Prize, in partnership with Granta, Ninth Letter, and The Common. Thanks so much to all who entered!

Fiction and Grand Prize Winner: “Animals After Dark” by Avigayl Sharp

(will be published in Granta.com)

Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, New England Review, and DIAGRAM, among other publications, and has received support or recognition from the Granum Foundation, the Bridport Prize, and the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowships. In 2022, she was named runner-up in the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize. She received her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas, where she was the fiction editor of Bat City Review. She now lives in Brooklyn and is an assistant editor at American Short Fiction. 

FINALISTS IN FICTION:

Swathi Desai, “An Offering to the Gods”

Brynne Jones, “The Troop Leader”

---

Nonfiction Winner: “Kingdom Cash & Glossolalia” by Tiana Clark

(will be published in NinthLetter.com)

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a winner for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award (Claremont Graduate University), a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, and the 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship and 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, The Best American Poetry 2022, and elsewhere. She teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

FINALISTS IN NONFICTION:

Charisse Baldoria, “Learning to be Filipino”

Wiam El-Tamami, “This Shattering”

Vincent Tolentino, “Fall of a Pigeon”

Kira Witkin, “Marvelous Tools”

---

Poetry Winner: “The Gardener” by Joshua Burton

(will be published in The Common)

Joshua Burton is a poet and educator from Houston, TX and received his MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. He is a 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop Scholar, 2019 Juniper Summer Writing Institute scholarship winner, 2019 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics fellowship finalist, received the Honorable Mention for the 2018 Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize, 2020 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing finalist, and a 2023 Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient. His work can be found in Mississippi Review, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, Conduit, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, Grist, and Indiana Review. His chapbook Fracture Anthology is currently out with Ethel and his debut poetry collection Grace Engine is forthcoming in the spring of 2023 with the University of Wisconsin Press.

FINALISTS IN POETRY:

Meryl Altman

Bryan Alexander Byrdlong

Meghan Dunn

Alixen Pham

Austin Tucker

---

---