In April, The Georgia Review announced the winner, runner-up, and finalists for our first annual prose prize, which honors outstanding essays and fictional works. Jennine Capó Crucet served as final judge for the competition.
Read the full list of finalists, and visit our prose prize info page to learn more about the contest, which will open for 2024 entries this fall.
Brian Truong is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has received fellowships and support from Millay Arts, Periplus, Tin House, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. “Fake Handbags,” winner of the inaugural Georgia Review Prose Prize, is his first published essay and is a part of his memoir-in-progress about growing up in a family of working-class Vietnamese refugees in Texas.
Ernie Wang is a second-generation Chinese-Japanese-American writer. He grew up on U.S. military bases in Japan. His short fiction appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Story, and elsewhere.
L. J. Sysko is the author of The Daughter of Man (University of Arkansas Press, 2023), selected for the Miller Williams Poetry Series by Patricia Smith, and Battledore (Finishing Line Press, 2017), a poetry chapbook. Sysko’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,” Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is Director of Executive Communications at Delaware State University.
Kosiso Ugwueze’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Joyland, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, New England Review, and Best American Short Stories. She is the winner of a New England Review Award for Emerging Writers and the recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant for feminist fiction. A recent graduate of the MFA program in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, she lives in Los Angeles.