The J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction

“One foot in this world and one in the next”: that’s how J.F. Powers described the Midwestern priests he wrote about in his fiction. Having one foot in another world can be awkward, and Powers’ characters are known not for their graceful mysticism, but for the humiliating and mordantly entertaining stumbles they make while trying to live their faith. We’re looking for carefully crafted short stories with vivid characters who encounter grace in everyday settings—we want to see who, in the age we live in, might have one foot in this world and one in the next.

Deadline: Submissions for the 2023 J.F. Powers Prize will be open October 1, 2023 until November 30, 2023. Winners will be announced in April 2024.

Click here to make your submission and see the writer's guidelines.

Prize Amounts

1st place: $700 and publication in Dappled Things

2nd place: $300 and publication in Dappled Things

Honorable mentions (up to 8): Publication and a year's subscription to Dappled Things

Past Winners

2022 Winner: "Terms of Bereavement" by Melissa Boberg

Subtle, refined, keenly perceptive, and full of tangible sorrow, this story of women navigating the fragments of their social and religious worlds after the collapse of two marriages evokes the tragedy inherent in the truth that we hold our souls’ treasures “in vessels of clay.”

2021 Winner: “The New Future” by Drew Denton.

“Grace is everywhere,” especially where it is least expected, in this innovative tale that follows a community of vulnerable people living a precarious existence on the margins in downtown Atlanta. While it takes on a range of serious social issues such as economic inequity, gentrification, culture, and the availability (or lack) of support for adults unable to live on their own, the story handles this heavy material with an admirable lightness of touch through the sensory, social, and spiritual worlds of the characters. In this way it remains grounded in the actual lives, interactions, experiences, and daily needs of those most affected, not as sociological case studies, but as human beings with dignity, desires, humor, pain, and flashes of joy—real, living souls.

2020 Winner: “A Fire in the Hills” by Sally Thomas.

“A Fire in the Hills” was a standout submission in the midst of a very strong long list, both in terms of its literary quality, and in terms of its honest engagement with the narrator's trauma. The narrator's voice, as well as her deft use of point-of-view shifts and non-linear narrative structure to engage with and complicate our sense of who she is, read as the authentic record of a wise and introspective, yet conflicted, woman. The characters in this story, and its protagonist in particular, come across as vivid and complex, wrestling with the meaning of their own sins and scars even as they fumble towards wholeness (and holiness). Longer short stories (this one is over 7500 words) need to be able to justify their length, and this is one piece we would not wish any shorter.

2019 Winner: “Waiting for Camacho” by Angela Lorang.

The immediacy of the narration, the believability of Camacho’s voice, and the elevated stakes of the action all contribute to make this piece outstanding. It is an unexpected conversion story: Camacho has seen and done terrible things and yet wants to make a radical change to the good. Due to Lorang’s deft handling of the prose’s revelations as well as of revealed truth, the story isn’t weighted down by its grave themes but instead achieves a remarkable range of effects: compassion, humor, grief over sin and pain, and authentic hope for redemption.

2018 Winner: “It Was the Last Time It Snowed” by Bridget O’Donnell-Muller

We found this standout story incredibly powerful in terms of content, structure, and execution. Its prose is marvelously well knit in every moment, and its compassion is remarkable, especially in light of the intense human tragedy at the story’s heart.

Bridget received her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia and her M.F.A. in Fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is an Assistant Editor for Narrative magazine, and has been a Fellow and/or Artist in Residence at The Grunewald Guild, the Vermont Studio Center, the Noepe Center for Literary Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

2017 Winner: “Obedience Lessons” by Abigail Rine Favale

“Obedience Lessons,” our pick as winner of the 2017 J.F. Powers Prize, is a deft and seamless portrait of a man caught unawares by the consequences of half-forgotten transgressions, and who must choose whether to let this revelation upset his comfortable, quiet life. We were drawn in from the first page, but it was the story’s exquisite ending that sent this piece straight to the top of our list.

Abigail Rine Favale is a professor in the William Penn Honors Program, a Great Books program at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon. Her short fiction has appeared in the Potomac Review and Talking River Review, and she’s also written non-fiction essays in print and online for publications such as The Atlantic and First Things. She is currently writing a book about her conversion to Catholicism, which will be published in 2018 with Cascade Books. Abigail is wife to Michael, and mother to two (soon to be three!) small children.

2016 Winner: “And Upon Awakening” by Linda McCullough Moore

Linda McCullough Moore is the author of the novel The Distance Between (SOHO PRESS), a collection of linked stories, This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon (Thornapple Books), and an essay collection, The Book of Not So Common Prayer (Abingdon Press). She lives and writes in western Massachusetts where she teaches creative writing and mentors aspiring writers.

2015 Winner: “The Ends of the Earth” by Anthony Lusvardi, S.J.

Anthony Lusvardi, S.J., a Jesuit brother, writes for The Jesuit Post and is the administrator of St. Charles, St. Bridget, and St. Agnes parishes on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Before joining the Jesuits, he taught English for the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, among other ventures.

2014 Winner: “Where Moth and Rust” by Kristin Luehr

The 2014 prize judges had this to say about the winning story:

"Where Moth and Rust" was our pick as winner of the 2014 J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction.  This painful, yet hopeful story is about family dynamics, about leaving and returning home, about the baggage we carry with us, and, ultimately, about the underlying power of love.  With a writing style that was taut yet portentous, and with a keen eye for unusual detail, the writer brought us into the lives of an ordinary family in the devastated landscape of rural Nebraska.  It was this very landscape, in fact, that was a character itself, and made the story’s notes of hope all the more powerful.  We were impressed.