2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize Winner Erika Krouse Reading and in Conversation

Join us for an afternoon with award-winning author Erika Krouse, recipient of New Literary Project’s 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize, reading from her work and in conversation with Fiona McFarlane about writing, storytelling, and the art of paying attention. New Literary Project awards the Joyce Carol Oates Prize to mid-career fiction writers whose body of work speaks to the organization’s mission and vision. The prize is awarded not in recognition of a single book, but to an emerged and still emerging writer of national consequence, at the relatively middle stage of a burgeoning career. The 2026 recipient receives a $50,000 award to encourage and support forthcoming work. The 2026 JCO winner, Erika Krouse, is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, including her most recent collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, longlisted for The Story Prize. Her memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, won the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Housatonic Book Award, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her novel Contenders was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and her earlier story collection, Come Up and See Me Sometime, won the Paterson Fiction Prize and was named a New York Times Notable Book. Krouse’s short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, Ploughshares, One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, and numerous other publications, and has been selected for Best American Mystery and Suspense and Best Mystery Stories of the Year. Her story “Eat My Moose,” from Save Me, Stranger, won the 2025 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. She is also a recipient of the Colorado Book Award and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. Krouse teaches and mentors writers at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver and lives in Colorado.