Announcing the 2026 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize Finalists!

A wide range of titles from some of America's best under-appreciated women writers.

It’s that time of year again, in which we announce the ten finalists for the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Awarded annually since 1976, the prize recognizes a work of fiction by an early-career woman writer and is presented by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester.¹

Here’s the official description from the website:

This prize was created in honor and memory of Janet Heidinger Kafka, a young editor who was killed in a car accident just as her career was beginning. Those who knew her believed she would do much to further the causes of literature and women. Her family, friends, and professional associates created the endowment from which the prize is bestowed, in memory of Janet Heidinger Kafka and the literary standards and personal ideals for which she stood.

Each year a substantial cash prize is awarded to a woman who is a US citizen, and who has written the best book-length work of prose fiction, whether novel, short stories, or experimental writing. We are interested in calling attention to the work of a promising but less established writer.

If you look at the list of past winners (the years on this page refer to the year the book was published, not the year the award was granted), you’re going to see a ton of recognizable names and critically-acclaimed titles, including last year’s recipient: Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky, published by Ecco.

I want to bring special attention to Oshetsky, not just because she’s the most recent winner of the award, and not just because Poor Deer is an excellent book, marvelously structured, and a quite moving way of examining the lingering effects of trauma and grief, but also because she has a new novel out, Evil Genius, which has numerous glowing reviews.

For this year’s finalists, I’ve listed all of them below along with their official marketing copy. All ten are worth checking out, and make for great summer reading.

We’ll be announcing the winner in August, after which they will be invited to the University of Rochester for a public presentation, and in preparation for the event, we will be hosting a multi-session reading group for students, faculty, staff, and community members. Stay tuned for more details!

And with that, on to the finalists, starting with . . .

Last Night at the Disco by Lisa Borders (Regal House Publishing)

“I may have ended up more notorious than famous, but make no mistake: long before Aura Lockhart began commodifying her feminist rage ballads, I was the best-known person to come out of Keyhole, New Jersey.” In 1977, twenty-six-year-old Lynda Boyle is desperate for fame and a way out of New Jersey. After failing to make her mark as an East Village poet and rubbing elbows with stars at Studio 54, she discovers a new path to glory through two local musicians, Johnny Engel and Aura Lockhart. Lynda believes she alone can transform them into rock ’n’ roll legends. Fast forward four decades: Lynda is in hiding after a series of events force her to flee the tri-state area. When she sees Aura inducting Johnny into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Lynda's rage ignites. Determined to reclaim her narrative, she sets out to tell her story and secure her rightful place in music history. If she settles a few other scores along the way, that's just a bonus. Last Night at the Disco is a bold exploration of ambition, fame, and the often messy intersections of friendship and betrayal in the music world.

Crown by Evanthia Bromiley (Grove Press)

Jude Woods is on the brink of eviction. Pregnant, jobless, and mother to Evan and Virginia, she has three days to box up her family’s life and find a safe place to live. In the Woods’ quiet trailer park, neighbors keep to themselves, but it’s no secret Jude and her twins are in jeopardy—the eviction notice slapped on their front door like a white shout.

When Jude’s contractions flare just as their power is shut off, she rushes to the hospital instructing Evan and Virginia to hide in their car in the surrounding fields. If the children are discovered outside alone, they will be taken from her. Jude labors through the night in a crowded emergency room while the twins, desperate in the heat of the cramped car and spurred by their wild imaginations, strike out along the dangerous riverbank in search of a new home for their growing family. As night hurtles toward the morning lockout, both mother and children reckon with what it means to live and dream in a modern America insistent on slamming doors.

Poetic and distinct, the voices of the three Woods open to a chorus of waitresses and oil men, veterans and graffiti artists as Crown trawls the laundromats, public bus systems, and waiting rooms of a forgotten blue-collar city. In this mesmerizing, singular debut, the tenacious spirit of a young family and their community comes to profound and moving life.

Outside Women by Roohi Choudhry (University Press of Kentucky)

Lured away from her home in 1890s India, Sita is brought to South Africa as an indentured servant—one among millions funneled by the British to replace the recently abolished slave trade. One hundred years later, Hajra, a Pakistani scholar, is forced to flee to New York City from her home in Peshawar after witnessing a violent act meant to target her. She loses herself in academic research until she comes face-to-face with a photo of a laughing, defiant young woman brandishing a banner in protest. Inexorably drawn to this woman, Hajra travels to South Africa to learn more and unknowingly traces Sita’s path.

With raw imagery and rich sensory detail, Roohi Choudhry’s incandescent debut novel Outside Women intertwines the narratives of two women painfully yet valiantly carving their existences outside of patriarchal and colonial spaces as they search for kinship and strength in solidarity.

Bad Nature by Ariel Courage (Henry Holt)

When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States. From five-star Midwestern hotels to cultish Southwestern compounds, the two slowly make their way across the country. But will the revelations they experience along the way dissuade Hester from her goal?

Ragingly singular and surprisingly moving, Bad Nature is a story of stunning detours and twists until its final destination. Part road-trip novel, part revenge tale, part lament for our ongoing ecological crisis, it’s ultimately a deft examination of the indulgence of holding grudges, moral ambivalence, and the eternal possibility of redemption.

Sleep by Honor Jones (Riverhead)

Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously – the one she was born into, and the one she has made.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.

Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.

Warm and generous, unflinchingly human, and ultimately joyful and empowering, Sleep is about the cycles of motherhood and childhood, the cost of secrets and the burden of love, and what’s on the other side of silence: the world, rich in possibility.

Flat Earth by Anika Jade Levy (Catapult)

Avery is a grad student in New York working on a collection of cultural reports and flailing financially and emotionally. She dates older men for money, and others for the oblivion their egos offer. In an act of desperation, Avery takes a job at a right-wing dating app. The "white-paper" she is tasked to write for the startup eventually merges with her dissertation, resulting in a metafictional text that reveals itself over the course of the novel.

Meanwhile, her best friend, Frances, an effortlessly chic emerging filmmaker from a wealthy Southern family, drops out of grad school, gets married, and somehow still manages to finish her first feature documentary. Frances's triumphant return to New York as the toast of the art world sends Avery into a final tailspin, pushing her to make a series of devastating decisions.

In this generational portrait, attention spans are at an all-time low and dopamine tolerance is at an all-time high. Flat Earth is a story of coming of age in America, a novel about commodification, conspiracy theories, mimetic desire, and the difficulties of female friendship that’s as sharp and sardonic as it is heartbreaking.

Tantrum by Rachel Eve Moulton (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

Thea’s third pregnancy was her easiest. She wasn’t consumed with anxiety about the baby. She wasn’t convinced it was going to be born green, or have a third eye, or have tentacles sprouting from its torso. Thea was fine. Her baby would be fine.

But when the nurses handed Lucia to her, Thea just knew. Her baby girl was a monster. Not only was Lucia born with a full set of teeth and a devilish glint in her eye, but she’s always hungry. Indiscriminately so. One day Lucia pointed at her baby brother, looked Thea dead in the eye and said, “I eat.”

Thea doesn’t know whether to be terrified or proud of her rapacious baby girl. And as Lucia starts growing faster and talking more, dark memories bubble to the surface—flashes from Thea’s childhood that won’t release their hooks from her heart. Lucia wants to eat the world. Thea might just let her.

Crackling with originality and dark humor, Rachel Eve Moulton’s Tantrum is a provocative exploration of familial debt, duty, and the darker side of motherhood.

State Champ: A Novel by Hilary Plum (Bloomsbury)

A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a “heartbeat law” criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down.

Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn’t follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss’s arrest and everything that’s been lost. She’ll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).

Angela’s protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her—an ex who’s a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine.

Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela’s story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are—in ways that can transform us—responsible for one another.

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters (Random House)

In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

Acidly funny and breathtaking in its scope, with the inventive audacity of George Saunders or Jennifer Egan, Stag Dance provokes, unsettles, and delights.

Girls Girls Girls by Shoshana Von Blanckensee (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

It’s the summer of ’96 and secret girlfriends Hannah and Sam are driving across the country from Long Beach, New York, to the fabled queer paradise of San Francisco, finally free from the stifling demands of Hannah’s devout Orthodox Jewish mother. In San Francisco, they can be a real couple, out in the open, around other queer people.

But when the financial strains of West Coast living push the girls to start stripping at the Chez Paree, Hannah feels trapped. Until she meets Chris, an older butch lesbian, who is immediately taken with her. Desperate to stay in San Francisco and away from the leering men at the club, Hannah proposes an escort arrangement.

As Hannah falls deeper into Chris’s world, and Sam starts to meet new queer friends, a rift forms between them. Without Sam, who is Hannah? And what does San Francisco mean to Hannah alone? An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the ’90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.

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All of these titles are available through your local bookstore, along with Bookshop.org and other online retailers.

Also, this year’s judges are: Eileen Daly-Boas, University of Rochester Library; Taylor Ellis, Archivist Books; Laura Whitebell, Writing, Speaking, and Argument; Rachel O’Donnell, Writing, Speaking, and Argument; and Chad W. Post, Open Letter Books.

And for publishers who’d like to submit titles coming out in 2026 for the 2027 iteration of the award, all of the information can be found here.

1. The specific eligibility rules can be found here, but in short, we consider “early-career” to mean fewer than three published works of prose, be it novels or story collections.