Chautauqua Literary Arts and the Department of Education at Chautauqua Institution are pleased to announce twelve finalists for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize. To be awarded this summer for the seventh 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, a record number of more than 210 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 twelve finalists for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize and their works are:  

• Emma Francois, “Glints” 
• Subraj Singh, “Anancy and the Hot White Gays” 
• Jingjing Xiao, “A Love Song for the Apocalypse” 
• Tria Wen, “Out of Ashes, Wildflowers” 
• Adrienne Elder, “JOHN” 
• Ling Yuan Leong, “Half Sick of Shadows” 
• Jupiter Dandridge, “Heat Omen” 
• Yiming Sun, “The Only Daughter” 
• Olivia Jung, “Right Before the Fall” 
• Grace Rich, “The Terrarium” 
• Vincent Omni, “The Diaspora Café” 
• Marguerite Sheffer, “Tiger on My Roof” 

The 2024 guest judge is novelist and educator Jimin Han, who will select a winner from these twelve finalists to be announced in mid-May. Han will be the Week Three prose resident faculty writer for the Chautauqua Writers’ Center — the same week this year’s prize is to be awarded. The winner will be honored at the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize Ceremony, set for 6 p.m. EDT Tuesday, July 9, 2024, in the Athenaeum Hotel Parlor on the grounds of the Institution. 

Still in its infancy, the Chautauqua 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. The list of accolades for previous winners and finalists is growing.  

The 2018 (and inaugural) Chautauqua Janus Prize winner Nicole Cuffy’s debut novel Dances, from OneWorld, was published in May 2023 and has been longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award. Dances will be featured as a 2024 CLSC selection during Week Nine this summer. We encourage you to join us for Cuffy’s CLSC Author Presentation on Thursday, August 22, 2024, at 3:30 p.m. in the Hall of Philosophy.  

2022 Chautauqua Janus Prize winner Stephanie Nina Pitsirilos’s forthcoming short story collection from Janus Point Press, Event Horizon: Stories of No Turning Back, promises an engaging, genre-bending experience. Her critically acclaimed work has been highlighted by Publishers Weekly, Kore Press, Broken Pencil Magazine, and named as a Canzine2021 finalist. 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. Also noteworthy is Jonathan Escoffery, a three-time finalist for the Chautauqua 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 has been a pleasure to witness the growth of the Chautauqua Janus Prize since its inception and inaugural award in 2018. The elevation of emerging writers remains important and thrilling work,” says Stephine Hunt, Manager of Literary Arts. “To see these writers propel onto the literary scene with such success speaks volumes to the significance of this prize, both for Chautauqua and the literary world. It has been an honor to support the founders’ visions and celebrate these emerging writers.”

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 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. 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 Kwame Alexander Writers’ Lab & Conference, 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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