Announcing the 2025 PEN America Literary Awards Winners

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection ($5,000)

To a poet whose distinguished collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

Winner: Load in Nine Times, Frank X Walker (Liveright, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “American history is riddled with irony we can neither escape nor avoid. If anything, our history comes looking for us to atone and to guide our struggles through the present. The poems in Load in Nine Times vividly imagine the voices of Americans born into slavery who suddenly found themselves enlisted as the first colored troops to fight for the Union Army. The result illuminates the individual characters and their particular history, but the book also renders a collective, a chorus singing lament and resilience down through the ages. That the end of the Civil War did little to end the struggle for true freedom is yet another irony this book probes with candor, through poems that exercise formal dexterity and invention. The shadows that these brave men, women and children cast in their own time are still falling on our nation. Frank X Walker’s art humanizes our pain and our hope. The eloquence of this book is wrenching, beautiful, and true.”

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000)

For a work that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience.

Winner: Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, Jason Roberts 

From the judges’ citation: “What does it mean for a thing to be alive? What are its parts, its mechanisms, its situatedness—what shall distinguish one bit of life from another? And above all, how do we—Homo sapiens—fit into the story of life on earth? The biological sciences have their ways of wrestling with these questions now, but so much of it goes back to two European men who hated each other: Linnaeus and Buffon, the founding fathers of taxonomy. Every Living Thing tells the addictive story of two scientists with radically different personalities, biographies, and—no surprise, then—radically different approaches to their work. Their decades-long rivalry formed the bedrock of an entire field. Roberts’ prose is rich in acutely observed historical and cultural detail and paints a vivid picture of biology as it was before Darwin, geese growing on shrubs and all. Most of all, Every Living Thing is a portrait of science as a human activity, driven by ambition and grudge and status like everything humans do, yet still bending towards an ever-greater understanding of the world. This book is about the past, but one can’t read it without asking: what are the decisions scientists and their sponsors are making today that will affect how we understand the world in future centuries?” 

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($15,000)

For a seasoned writer whose collection of essays is an expansion on their corpus of work and preserves the distinguished art form of the essay.

Winner: A Passing West, Dagoberto Gilb (UNM Press, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “The charm of Dagoberto Gilb’s A Passing West is apparent quickly—in the wit, the granular observations and the distinctive, rollicking style of his prose—but that charm can be deceptive. The scope and gravity of this collection gather force over time.

A Passing West is rooted in Chicano California, Texas, and the greater Southwest, but journeys far beyond—back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, to the cornfields of Iowa, the deep South, to a vast archive of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica in Sevilla. It stops in restaurants, garages and construction sites along the way.

In these dispatches and meditations, Gilb proves himself a journeyman—a self-made Mexican American author from the working class, immersed in and inspired by books. He celebrates the dignity and durability of both intellectual and manual labor, and the people who do it.

Gilb’s voice is funny, contentious, absurd and learned. The essays challenge, entertain and illuminate. Taken together they amount to a unique chronicle of a culture and people, both migratory and deeply rooted, whose immense presence and contributions to the fabric of American life have been historically diminished, obscured and purposefully hidden.A Passing West marks an important contribution to the art of the essay and a distinguished achievement in this author’s 50-year career. We are honored to select it for this year’s award.”

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000)

For a biography of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research.

Winner: Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball, Keith O’Brien (Pantheon, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “Pete Rose was unpolished, unstoppable, and above all, driven to win, win, and win again. Keith O’Brien’s monumental, nuanced biography—Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball—evokes Rose’s headlong rush in a scrupulously reported, relentless narrative that tracks Rose from his working-class Cincinnati childhood, to his rise and reign and ultimate ruin in baseball. Winning was everything in the Rose cosmos, and that impulse fed the addiction that caused Rose to violate baseball’s cardinal rule against gambling on one’s own games, pulling the lovers, teammates, owners, parasites, bookies, and fans who orbited around him into an inescapable void.

Charlie Hustle is not the first biography of Pete Rose, but it is the first one for which Rose spoke to an author without having some kind of editorial control. According to O’Brien, Rose was cooperative at first, and then, perhaps from shame or fear, cut off communication. In that truncated contact, O’Brien found something profound. Yet the author’s true achievement is in the breadth and depth of his reporting and research, in conversations with dozens upon dozens of sources, in poring over court records and contemporaneous journalism. That wealth of knowledge and understanding is illuminated by O’Brien’s artful, urgent prose, filled with portents and precedents that feel as epic and mythic as the sport itself. In exploring a realm dominated by male characters, O’Brien takes extra care to portray the women in his narrative as important actors with complexity and agency—not as mere collateral damage in Rose’s wreckage.

Like many great biographies, Charlie Hustle is about more than the story of its subject. It is a history of baseball—and particularly the intractable, intertwined relationship between the game and gambling, culminating in Rose’s permanent banishment from the sport, and punctuated by the irony of the emergence of legalized sports betting. It is about the eternal duel between principle and corruption, about the very reasons a collective adopts rules, and what happens when we allow them to be bent, or broken, so that we can have our own, individual victories. And it is a book about working-class America, caught up in that duality. The judges, while reading this book, could not help but feel that the dynamic behind this story—particularly the way in which many of Rose’s white, midwestern fans continued to believe in Rose’s professed innocence even after it was resoundingly debunked—speaks greatly to the current political moment. Our consensus seemed to be confirmed when, after our decision, the current President suggested a posthumous Federal pardon for Pete Rose. The rules are a reflection of our impartial ideal; but their partial application is our reality. 

“Winning is what counts,” Pete Rose once said. “They don’t pay you to lose.” Charlie Hustle is a book about the costs of winning at all costs, and the worthlessness of apologies that come too late. Keith O’Brien has captured, in telling the story of a flawed, fallen American icon, a fable for our American age.” 

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)

For a book-length translation of poetry from any language into English.

Winner: To The Letter, by Tomasz Różycki (Archipelago Press, 2024)
Translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal

From the judges’ citation: “Of the five splendid works chosen as finalists for this year’s prize, Tomasz Rozycki’s To The Letter rose to the surface as a serious yet playful book, creatively experimental while urgently addressing the local and global history and the prescient now. Mira Rosenthal’s dexterity and craft as a poet herself are made evident in her intricately wrought translations from Rozycki’s complex and nuanced Polish. These ninety-nine poems, often steeped in philosophical conundrums, appear to dwell in Poland’s past and present. Their universality, however, quickly emerges through this masterful translation, such as in the poem “Outside Prudnik” where the speaker observes initially that “you’re not here. You’re far away, remote/ somewhere that’s nowhere” but then shifts: “Do you believe it’s possible/ to die for love? If you believe, then take this death as keepsake.” Who is speaking, who are those “you” he addresses? The traumatic past and present of this country, a history of unstable borders, is, in the poet’s experience, a shifting collage where absence and presence are distressingly interchangeable. As Ms. Rosenthal writes in her lucid afterword, “Rozycki’s childhood made him a poet of this layered communal history, with an awareness of successive catastrophes across Eastern Europe and an acute sense that something was missing.”  This translation of To The Letter exemplifies Rozycki’s masterful technique—poetry is the conjunction of technique and an aesthetic vision—as one of his country’s leading poets, while at the same time establishing Rosenthal as one of our most skillful translators.”

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)

For a book-length translation of prose from any language into English.

Winner: Verdigris, Michele Mari (And Other Stories, 2024)
Translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore

From the judges’ citation: “In his translator’s note, Brian Robert Moore notes the awe and wonder we experience “each time we immerse ourselves in the beauty and mystery of a good book.” Verdigris has beauty—often enough apprehended through squalor and putrescence—and mystery abounding, and Moore conveys them in all their fullness through an elegant translation ingeniously solving some vexatious problems that keep translators awake. This novel depends on its associative meanings in mnemonics, word plays, slips of the tongue and pen, enough to do Freud proud and enough to press the translator into challenging creativity in finding plausible equivalents. Moore’s apparent ease can only have come about through the hard labor of ars celare artem. The insoluble problem of dialect finds an efficient solution through Moore’s consistent and convincing resort to Irish expressions and locutions. The narrator speaks of being in “a place both poetic and rotten,” and the whole novel is marked by intense contrasts of horrible ugliness and decay side by side with transcendent beauty and empathy indebted both to Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and to Baudelaire’s terrifyingly magnificent poem “Une charogne.” Moore negotiates these powerful contradictions by choosing strong, concrete, and physical vocabulary. Careful attention to the need for replicating similar registers in both beginning and ending of the novel make the overall structure plausible. Moore’s is a translation of elegance and power, adeptly transmitting the foulness and the lyric fragility the author invokes.”

PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel ($10,000)

To a debut novel of exceptional literary merit by an American author.

Winner: Early Sobrieties, Michael Deagler (Astra House, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “Michael Deagler’s Early Sobrieties is an exquisitely honest, humorous, and poignant depiction of life on the far side of addiction. Its hero, Dennis Monk, seven months sober, finds temporary shelter on the guest beds and couches of Philadelphia while seeking a foothold in the young adulthood that’s been passing him by. This uniquely sustained portrait of recovery, all of its tedium shot through with moments of transcendence, lays bare the beautiful terror of each blank day, and the raw miracle of being alive.”

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000)

To an author whose debut collection of short stories represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise for future work.

Winner: Sad Grownups, Amy Stuber (Stillhouse Press, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “Sad Grownups is a collection full of surprises, both in its craft and content. Amy Stuber’s stories feel deeply familiar yet wholly unique, with mature, expansive explorations of womanhood, work and labor, the body, and the short story form itself, featuring characters who persist outside and beyond their narratives. This persistence is aided by Stuber’s balance of humor with careful renderings of loss and struggle, and by the author’s ability to invite the reader into each story—sometimes literally—with conspiratorial precision and feisty, poignant social commentary. A remarkable debut, released with the very small and (self-described) “gutsy” Stillhouse Press, Sad Grownups showcases Stuber’s potential and exceptional skill.”

PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000)

For a distinguished book of general nonfiction published, possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective that illuminates important contemporary issues.

Winner: In The Shadow of Liberty, Ana Raquel Minian (Viking Penguin, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “In The Shadow of Liberty by Ana Raquel Minian is a vivid history of immigration policy in the United States that examines the sometimes inhumane treatment of those who come to the country seeking asylum and economic security. 

Minian captures the extreme circumstances that drive people to seek a new life in a new land, and the xenophobia that consistently greets them at the border. Through the deeply researched tales of individuals during four historical waves of immigration, Minian argues that more lenient approaches that the U.S. has experimented with in the past, such as paroling immigrants rather than detaining them, have been equally effective and far less cruel.

With comprehensive reporting and novelistic prose, Minian illuminates how harsh detention policies at the border betray American liberal ideals—a powerful message, particularly now.” 

PEN Open Book Award ($10,000)

To an exceptional book-length work of any literary genre by an author of color.

Winner: Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times, Kali Nicole Gross (Seal Press, 2024)

From the judges’ citation: “Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times is an enthralling account centering unsung Black women who fought racism and sexism with axes, pistols, hatchets, and fists. Gross digs deep into the archives to unearth remarkable stories of Black women who lied, cheated, stole, and hit back to defend their honor and demand justice that no one else would offer them. Gross marshals an impressive array of historical evidence, from arrest records to reportage from the Black presses, to render twentieth-century Philadelphia, its seedy back alleys, thriving juke joints, and parks bursting with picnics. At once humorous, provocative, and riveting, Vengeance Feminism writes into the gaps left by histories of the Black Women’s Club Movement and poor Black women often viewed as its passive beneficiaries. A rare page-turning history, the book leans into the elements of story, scene, dialogue, and plot, to bring its subjects to vibrant life. Gross offers a magnificent example of the necessity of reclaiming forms of resistance deemed disreputable and even dangerous, as well as a blueprint for grounding such stories in rich contexts to allow for empathy and respect for subjects. Gross’s elegant, eye-opening tour de force reminds us that Black women need not always “go high,” and that history shows they’ve always been on the frontlines defending their livelihoods, their bodies, and their honor, with a knife in hand.”

PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature

For a living author whose body of work—either written in or translated into English—represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama, and is of enduring.

Honoree: Mia Couto

From the judges’ citation: “For decades, the work of Mozambican writer Mia Couto has occupied a singular place in the landscape of both African and world literature. His earliest books, written in the wake of his country’s civil war, were searing reflections on the wounds of that period. Their titles alone speak volumes: “Voices Made Night,” “Sleepwalking Land,” “A River Called Time.” Since then, he has continued to probe his nation’s fraught history as well as essential riddles of identity and existence. Like Imani, the vaChopi tribeswoman in “The Drinker of Horizons,” the final book in his epic “Sands of the Emperor” trilogy, Couto is an alchemist of languages and worlds. (“I spin a web that joins the different races,” Imani says.) We believe that Couto, who was awarded the 2014 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, deserves even greater recognition on the global stage, and it is our hope that the 2025 PEN/Nabokov Award will help lift his voice across yet more borders. “We are building myths,” Couto has said of his fellow Mozambican writers who have grown with their country. “We are substitutes for the prophets.”

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award

For an American playwright in mid-career with an outstanding voice working indisputably at the highest level of achievement.

Winner: Mona Mansour

From the judges’ citation: “For over twenty years, playwright Mona Mansour has dedicated herself to deepening the range of stories that are seen on US stages that explore the multi-valent geopolitical conflicts and warring irresolutions of the MENASA region and its diasporic communities. Among her astonishingly attuned, astute and heartbreaking plays are Unseen, We Swim, We Talk, We Go to War, and The Vagrant Trilogy. Rigorous and compassionate writing, nuanced and complex characters, artful structural composition are consistent elements that distinguish her writing for the stage. The range and soulfulness of her work is a wonder to behold, and we have full faith that her unwavering commitment to speaking truths to power will remain steadfast as her career continues to flourish and impact the field.”

PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing

For a magazine editor whose high literary standards and taste have, throughout their career, contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication they edit.

Honoree: Charles Henry Rowell

From the judges’ citation: “Some literary journals do more than publish—they build communities, challenge assumptions, and make space for voices too often unheard. For decades, Charles Henry Rowell has done just that through his work with Callaloo. Under his editorship, the journal became a vital platform for Black writers, artists, and scholars across the African diaspora. Charles Henry Rowell didn’t just edit a publication—he cultivated a safe space and an artistic community. The depth, range, and intellectual courage found in Callaloo reflect his vision and dedication. His influence stretches far beyond the page, shaping the broader landscape of American literature in lasting and meaningful ways.”