2025 James Baker Hall Book Award for a Short Story Collection
Toni Ann Johnson
Toni Ann Johnson won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste (UGA Press, 2022), which was selected for the prize and edited by Roxane Gay. The book was nominated for a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and shortlisted for the 2024 Saroyan Prize. A novella, Homegoing, won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest in 2020 and was released by the press in 2021. Johnson’s first novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel (2014), was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Johnson’s short fiction has appeared in the Coachella Review, Hunger Mountain, Callaloo Journal, Fiction Magazine, and many other publications. She won the 2015 International Latino Book Award for Most Inspirational Fiction.
Her stage plays have been produced by The Negro Ensemble Company (co-author “Here in My Father’s House”), The New York Stage and Film Company (“Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public”), and in Los Angeles by The Fountainhead Theatre Company. Johnson is the recipient of two Humanitas Prizes and a Christopher Award for her screenplays Ruby Bridges, for Disney/ABC and Crown Heights, for Showtime Television. She wrote the Fox Television pilot Save The Last Dance and she co-wrote the feature film Step Up 2: The Streets. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and she’s been a Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab fellow, a Kimbilio fellow, a Hurston/Wright fellow, and a Callaloo Writing Workshop fellow. She’s received additional support for her writing from the One-Story Summer Conference, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. In 2024, she was selected by Crystal Wilkinson as one of the inaugural winners of the Screen Door Press Prize for her linked story collection But Where’s Home? The collection is forthcoming from the new imprint of the University Press of Kentucky in February of 2026.
2024 James Baker Hall Book Award for Poetry
Greg Pape
Greg Pape is the author of nine books, including Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern (University of Pittsburgh Press), Sunflower Facing the Sun, winner of the Edwin Ford Piper Prize (University of Iowa Press), and American Flamingo, winner of a Crab Orchard Open Competition Award (Southern Illinois University Press). His poems have been published widely in such magazines and literary reviews as The Atlantic, Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Northwest Review, and Poetry. He has received the Discovery/The Nation Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, and his poems have been featured on NPR and read by Garrison Keillor on The Writers’ Almanac. He teaches at the University of Montana, and in the Brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University. Greg served as Poet Laureate of Montana from 2007 to 2009.
