Chautauqua Institution is delighted to announce “On Impressions” by Lily Taylor as the winner of the 2023 Chautauqua Janus Prize. 

In another record-breaking year for submissions, Taylor’s “On Impressions” was selected by guest judge Michael Martone among nine finalists. Taylor will receive the $5,000 prize, plus a $2,000 travel and lodging stipend. She will give a public lecture and reading at a celebratory event at 5 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Aug. 16, in the parlor of the Athenaeum Hotel as part of Chautauqua Institution’s 2023 Summer Assembly. 

A nonfiction writer with a specialization in lyric essays, Taylor holds degrees from the University of Oklahoma and Auburn University. She will start law school at the University of Virginia this fall. “On Impressions” will be published by Chautauqua Literary Arts and made available for purchase throughout the 2023 Summer Season at the Chautauqua bookstore and the CLSC Octagon building. 

“Winning the Chautauqua Janus Prize is a dream beginning to my career,” Taylor said. “I wrote ‘On Impressions’ as a way to try and better understand myself, never daring to hope that it might connect with others. I am honored to have my name associated with the Chautauqua Institution’s, as well as with the work of my fellow finalists.” 

Michael I. Rudell Director of Literary Arts Sony Ton-Aime praised Taylor’s winning piece as “one of the most creative essays of recent memory. By using history, painting, memoir, and popular culture, Taylor presents an honest and gut-wrenching study of beauty, and how its allures can both confine and exploit those society deems beautiful. As Taylor writes in this game (of beauty), nobody wins. But by reading this piece, we are sure to win a lot.” 

Guest judge Michael Martone concurred: “’On Impressions’ caught my eye,” he said, “as it is about catching one’s eye, how one’s eye is ‘caught’ exactly. Exactly. The essay expertly exerts pressure on that word ‘impression’ and forces (like one would force a bulb to flower) a panoply of meanings, emotions, and memories. The essay works, like the Impressionist paintings it regards, in suggestion, nuance, juxtaposition, and collage. It invites, allows, and encourages a collaboration to exist between the writer and the reader that is complex and layered, ethereal and concrete, microscopic and multidimensional; and was brilliant at cantilevering these elements elegantly.” 

Martone, who will be a writer-in-residence this summer, is a retired professor at the University of Alabama. He also taught creative writing for 40 years at Iowa State, Harvard, and Syracuse universities and Warren Wilson College. He has won multiple awards, fellowships, and grants for his writings. His most recent books are Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (2022) and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (2020). He has authored or edited over two dozen books, including The Moon Over Wapakoneta (2018); Brooding (2018); Memoranda (2015); Winesburg, Indiana; and Double-wide (2007). He lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, the poet Theresa Pappas.

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. 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.