Institute for Immigration Research
New American Voices Award

Founded in 2018, Fall for the Book and the Institute for Immigration Research created an award to recognize recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.

Three jurors will judge all entries for the 2024 New American Voices Award and choose three finalists and then award the prize to one. Finalists will be announced in summer 2024 and all three finalists and the judges will appear at the Fall for the Book festival in October 2024 for the seventh annual presentation and read from and discuss their work. The winning writer will receive $5,000 and the two finalists each will receive $1,000.

If America is a country of immigrants as it is often described, then the quintessential American literature would be the literature of immigration... Hopefully these new voices will make us step back and look at ourselves with new eyes, and new hope and new meaning.

Helon Habila

2018 Judge

Submission Guidelines

Submit to the Award

Starting December 4, 2024, publishers can enter immigrant writers* who have published no more than three books.
Entries must be prose: literary fiction or creative nonfiction. Please no journalism, plays, anthologies, or poetry.
Eligible books must have been (or will be) published between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025.
Four bound copies of the book (galleys/ARCs are acceptable) must be postmarked April 7, 2025 (deadline extended from March 29) and sent to Kara Oakleaf at 4400 University Drive, MS 3E4, Fairfax, VA 22030, along with a $20 entry fee. Checks can be made out to Fall for the Book, Inc.; entry fee may also be paid online here.
For accessibility reasons, please also submit your book digitally. Please email them to kara [at] fallforthebookorg. If no bound copies will be available by the deadline, you may submit digitally only.

*Writers should be immigrants to the U.S., living in the States. They can be first generation by either definition of the term (born elsewhere and immigrated to the U.S., or born in the states to parents who immigrated to the U.S.) Questions? Contact Kara Oakleaf – kara[@]fallforthebook.org

Meet the Judges

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, which looks at the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there, before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division and is also core faculty at the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. She is one of the few journalists who have been allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War.Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, and The Guardian, among others. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship. She is a founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The book was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Take This Man: A Memoir was an Amazon Best Book of the Month selection and named by Kirkus Reviews as one the Best Nonfiction Books of the year. His latest novel, My Name Is Iris, was named one of the Washington Post’s Fifty Notable Works of Fiction in 2023. Skyhorse has also co-edited an anthology, We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories Of Passing in America. He has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Lake Como, Italy, the Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, and was the 2014-15 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University. Skyhorse is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University in Bloomington where he directs the Creative Writing program.

Mary-Alice Daniel was born near the Niger/Nigeria border, then raised in England and Tennessee. Her poetry debut, Mass for Shut-Ins (2023), won the 117th Yale Younger Poets Prize and a California Book Award. In 2022, Ecco/HarperCollins published her tricontinental memoir, A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing, which was People’s Book of the Week and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Nonfiction Books of the Year. A Cave Canem Fellow and an alumna of Yale University (BA) and the University of Michigan (MFA), she received a PhD in English Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University, she held the 2024 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. She turns to her third and fourth books of poetry + prose as a scholar at Princeton University.