Chautauqua Literary Arts and the Department of Education at Chautauqua Institution are pleased to announce nine finalists for the 2023 Chautauqua Janus Prize. To be awarded this summer for the sixth time, the Janus Prize has enjoyed a steady increase of interest among emerging writers and this year saw another record-breaking number of submissions.  

This year, more than 120 writers entered work to be considered for the prize that looks to celebrate an emerging writer’s single work of short fiction or nonfiction for daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder readers’ imagination. The nine finalists for the 2023 Chautauqua Janus Prize and their works are:  

Olamide Aremu, “A Tale of Two Rivers” 

Sarah Aziza, “The Hollow Half” 

Esinam Bediako, “The Daddy Issues” 

Vickie Chang, “The pulse of life” 

Agnes Hanying Ong, “Sent My Way” 

Naomi Shuyama Gomez, “Deadheading” 

Lily Taylor, “On Impressions”  

Blas Ulibarri, “If We Speak of Ourselves in Different Ways” 

Amber Wheeler Bacon, “Sexy Thing”  

The 2023 guest judge is the genre-defying Michael Martone, who will select a winner from these nine finalists to be announced at the end of this month. Martone will be the Week Eight prose writer-in-residence for the Chautauqua Writers’ Center — the same week this year’s prize is to be awarded. The winner will be honored at the 2023 Chautauqua Janus Prize Ceremony, set for 5 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 16, 2023, in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor on the grounds of the Institution. 

Still in its infancy, the Janus Prize’s reach and influence have grown beyond the Institution’s gates as the honored emerging writers make their names in the literary world. 

Memoirist and 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize winner Joseph Earl Thomas published his debut memoir, Sink, in February 2023 from Grand Central Publishing. His book, an evolution of his 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.  

The list of accolades for other previous winners and finalists is growing, as well. The 2018 (and inaugural) Janus Prize winner Nicole Cuffy’s debut novel Dances is forthcoming from OneWorld in May 2023 and is included in Oprah Daily’s “Spring Reading List.” Also receiving praise is Jonathan Escoffery, a three-time finalist for the Janus Prize, who published his debut short story collection If I Survive You with MacMillan in September 2022. That book 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. 

“It gives me great pleasure to see how the Chautauqua Janus Prize’s reach keeps growing year after year. It is fast becoming the standard literary prize for emerging writers,” said Sony Ton-Aime, the Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts at Chautauqua Institution. “Seeing the accolades that our past winners and finalists have gone on to receive as they move from ‘emerging’ to ‘established’ writers is proof of how much the literary world needed a prize like ours. I am deeply grateful to the founders’ visions, and it is an honor to continue this work.” 

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, 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, 2023, will be accepted as submissions for the 2024 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 Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, 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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