RJFWA Women Writers Receive 2026 Literary Honors
- Admin
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Julia Elliott’s (’12) story collection Hellions (Tin House/Zando) is shortlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2026 Southern Book Prize; Ladee Hubbard (’16) received a 2026 Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship; Lori Ostlund (’09) is a finalist for the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize from New Literary Project for her story collection Are We Happy? (Astra House); Alison C. Rollins (’18) is a 2026 Whiting Writer’s Award winner; and Namwali Serpell (’11) received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction.
Julia Elliott (’12) is the author of the story collection Hellions (Tin House/Zando, 2025), shortlisted for the 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and a Southern Book Prize finalist. Her other works are the novel The New and Improved Romie Futch and her debut story collection, The Wilds. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Tin House, Conjunctions, Reactor, Granta, and The New York Times. In addition to her Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, she has received two Pushcart Prizes, and her stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories. She teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina and lives in Columbia with her husband, daughter, and six hens.
Ladee Hubbard (’16) is the author of the novels The Talented Ribkins, which received the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, and The Rib King. She is also the author of the short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout, which was long listed for the Aspen Word Literary Prize. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and The Berlin Prize. She has also received grants and fellowships from The American Library in Paris, the Bellagio Center, Bogliasco, MacDowell and Baldwin Center for the Arts, among other organizations. She earned a BA in English from Princeton University, a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She lives in New Orleans and teaches creative writing at Tulane University.
Lori Ostlund (’09) is the author of three works of fiction: Are You Happy?: Stories (Astra House, 2025); her novel After the Parade (Scribner 2015), a Center for Fiction First Novel Prize finalist; and her debut story collection, The Bigness of the World, the recipient of the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The O .Henry Prize Winners, New England Review, and other places. She is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award and a board member of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, which supports feminist women in the arts.
Alison C. Rollins (’18) was named a 2023-2024 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellow in 2019. In 2021, her essay "Dispatch from the Racial Mountain" was selected by contest judge Kiese Laymon as the winner of the Gulf Coast prize in nonfiction. Her work, across genres, has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Iowa Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. Rollins is the author of the poetry collections Black Bell (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which was a 2020 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award nominee. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Namwali Serpell (’11) was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She is a fiction writer, a literary critic, and a professor of English at Harvard University. She received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction and the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing. Her first novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the L.A. Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows: An Elegy, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the California Book Award for Fiction. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Her most recent work, On Morrison, was published in February 2026.
(photos by Forrest Clonts, Nkechi Chibueze, Dennis Hearne, Beowulf Sheehan, Jordan Kines)
