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CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award

The CRAFT Creative Nonfiction Award for unpublished creative nonfiction up to 6,000 words is open to entries every November and December and awarded the following May. Three winners are selected by a guest judge, with $3,000 and publication awarded. Two pieces are also selected by CRAFT editors in the editors' choice round.

Judges:

2020: Joy Castro

alt text: image is a color photograph of baby turtles on a beach; title card for Gina DeMillo Wagner's Following Floodlights Instead of the Moon

Following Floodlights Instead of the Moon by Gina DeMillo Wagner

By Gina DeMillo Wagner | June 29, 2022

  The nature center has five baby sea turtles, each in their own 20-gallon saltwater tank. When I see them for the first time, I have to fight the impulse to plunge my hand into the water and scoop one…

alt text: image is a color photograph of classroom chairs pushed up against a desk; title card for Amy Evan's creative nonfiction piece "The Stoics"

The Stoics by Amy Evans

By Amy Evans | June 22, 2022

Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence   One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…

alt text: image is a color photograph of a cockroach; title card for JT Baldassarre's creative nonfiction piece "Roach Farm"

Roach Farm by JT Baldassarre

By JT Baldassarre | June 15, 2022

  We had gone to bed late, on usual terms: “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.” That night we did what we called “No Touch Sleep,” a nickname for exactly what it sounds like, lying next to each…

alt text: image is a color photograph of seedling plants; title card for Gilbert Arzola's creative nonfiction piece "Eight Months"

Eight Months by Gilbert Arzola

By Gilbert Arzola | June 8, 2022

  January Two old men used to live next to each other. One is dead and the other is dying. The one that is dead planted a garden. The one that is dying is my father. My father sits in…

alt text: image is a color photograph of a streak of car lights at night; title card for Myna Chang's creative nonfiction piece "We Were the Wild Hunt"

We Were the Wild Hunt by Myna Chang

By Myna Chang | June 6, 2022

  Riding the night streets wrapped in our tight young skin, brave-stupid and untamed, magic bursting from our pores like new stars. We met under the sign of the flying horse, the vacant shell of an old gas station, our…

Catalogue for a Coming of Age by Liz Harmer

By Liz Harmer | June 30, 2021

  000 Generalities In 1999, I worked two jobs and had just gotten out of the hospital. A few afternoons a week and on Saturdays I shelved books at a small branch of the public library, as I had been…

What You Don’t Know by Clare Fielder

By Clare Fielder | June 23, 2021

  I started boxing because of writing. I was working on a novel about young queer women being angry and boxing their way out of their small town. I needed terminology, so I went to a boxing training class. I…

The Ties that Bind by Tammy Delatorre

By Tammy Delatorre | June 16, 2021

  On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…

Face, Velvet, Church, Daisy, Red by Marilyn Hope

By Marilyn Hope | June 10, 2021

  A woman in a spruce-blue tracksuit enters my bedroom with a pickax and chips a hole in my wall. She collects smooth, fist-sized rubies from between the studs and places them in a music box, ribboned with dark grain,…

The Untimely Collaborators by Sara Davis

By Sara Davis | June 9, 2021

  There are mornings we just manage it. We rise in the weak gray light and take our coffee with our notebooks open. A sliver of meditative silence. Are you writing about me? you ask. No, I lie. Are you…