Announcing the Finalists for the 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature

As reported today in The Common, this year marks the tenth anniversary of our Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which supports immigrant writers whose work examines how immigration shapes our lives, our communities, and our world. In honor of the anniversary, Restless Books’ unstintingly generous board member, Steven G. Kellman—whose grandparents were immigrants to the United States—has endowed the prize so that it may continue in perpetuity. As ICE and federal agents invade our cities, we hope the newly named Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature can serve as a reminder that immigrants’ voices deserve to be heard. Anyone familiar with history knows that immigrants have always been the gravitational center of the extraordinary American experiment.

Of course, freedom is not only under siege in America, but all across the globe. As autocrats deny the rights of people in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine to remain on their own land, forced displacement is happening everywhere. 

The 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature was judged by Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans; the winner will be announced by LitHub on December 2. Please join us in celebrating the work of the following four finalists, and in holding up the power of immigrant stories to remind us of our common humanity. No one is free until all of us are free.

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Jaguar by Beto Caradepiedra

Eleven interwoven stories follow a Panamanian family across four generations of loss, triumph, and devotion in Jaguar, charting their way through the shifting landscapes of Panama and New York City. Hunted by crocodiles and jaguars, protected by dogs and the sea, each new offspring faces their own privations to survive, sustained by family, community, doubt, and determination.

READ THE EXCERPT

The Conviction of Things Not Seen by Isabel Cristina Legarda

Haunted by preoccupations with ancestry, displacement, faith, and loss, the stories collected in The Conviction of Things Not Seen explore the lives of Filipinos at home and in the Philippine diaspora, and their ability as immigrants to straddle two worlds. Here, a matriarch and her neighbors living in a Manila cemetery try to build a life in the shadow of drug raids and failed relationships; a concert pianist’s collaboration with a visiting artist brings up challenging memories from her past; four women host ghost tours at a Savannah bed-and-breakfast; and a young woman murdered under a totalitarian regime is investigated as a candidate for sainthood through her friends’ letters, journal entries, and text messages.

READ THE EXCERPT

The Church of Mastery by Stephen Narain

At the dawn of World War II, a boy named William (Billy Boy) Jones is trying to find his footing on a small Caribbean island where mangos grow and other boys pelt the back of his head with spitballs. William learns how to run fast, discovers poetry, and eventually migrates to America. Searching for what he calls “the perfect poem” amid romantic loss and spiritual doubt, he finds himself traveling with a group of like-minded artists in the deep South during the height of segregation. Is it possible to build a life around beauty when the world is only interested in institution and survival, capitalism and compromise?

READ THE EXCERPT

Drownproofing and Other Stories by Alexandra Lytton Regalado

A collection of interconnected narratives exploring identity, inheritance, trauma, and survival in contemporary Central America and its diaspora, Drownproofing and Other Stories takes place across the landscapes of El Salvador, Florida, and psychic memory. From daughters navigating motherhood and myth to a fisherman haunted by a lakeside ghost story, the collection bears witness to the fault lines of violence and grace, privilege and exile running through lives shaped by displacement, tenderness, and the will to surface.

READ THE EXCERPT

Announcing the Winner of the 2024 Prize for New Immigrant Writing: Sofi Stambo!

We are thrilled to share the announcement published in Literary Hub that this year’s Prize for New Immigrant Writing in fiction goes to Sofi Stambo for her collection of short stories titled A Bunch of Savages! It will be published in Spring 2026. The characters in the collection have come from all over the world to New York City, where they dance and laugh their way out of difficult situations and into even messier ones, struggling to play parts that fate seems to assign them at random. They run in and out of diners, offices, and painter’s workshops, gesticulating to explain themselves, never knowing the right words, or if they do, voicing them in a way only other immigrants can understand. Their nostalgia transforms the big city into their little Italy or little Odessa or little Sofia. With pathos and humor, scenes from the narrator’s former life in Bulgaria weave into the mix like dreams.

This year’s prize was judged by authors Rivka Galchen, Priyanka Champaneri, and Ilan Stavans, who have this to say about Sofi’s work:

“Sofi Stambo’s wondrous, unpredictable and extraordinarily perceptive humor lights up these pages, and occasionally even sets them on fire. A Bunch of Savages is a superb investigation into the contrary, bemusing, feral and fearsome facets of our shared human character.”

—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“Sofi Stambo’s prose is effervescent and her humor razor sharp, but it’s her empathy that won my heart. From Bulgarian beaches to city diners, these slice-of-life stories follow characters both heady with hope and noble in defeat, shaping a collection that’s ultimately an ode to the strange wonder of being alive.”

—Priyanka Champaneri, author of The City of Good Death

“In our dark age in which outsiders are easily—and lazily—satanized, Sofi Stambo offers an essential antidote: humanization. There is an ecumenical quality to her perspective. Her characters, no matter where they come from, are quirky, complex, emblematic, and, more than anything else, unique. A Bunch of Savages lusciously pushes immigrant literature to new heights.”

—Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books and author of Sabor Judio: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook

Sofi tells us, “I immigrated to the US twenty-seven years ago. Living in New York, I had to learn to hear, think, and write in English rather than my native Bulgarian or equally strong Russian. To think exclusively in English, to dream in it as proof of fluency has been a challenge. The way people struggle to express themselves because of cultural, educational, and language barriers is what interests me most as a writer.”

Sofi Stambo’s stories have been published by Promethean, Ep;phany, The Kenyon Review, The MacGuffin, New Letters, Fourteen Hills, New England Review, Stand, American Short Fiction, Guernica, AGNI, Chicago Quarterly Review, Granta Bulgaria, Tin House, Another Chicago Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Rumpus. She was awarded the 2024 LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for short fiction, won the first prize in fiction in the 2015 Dzanc Books/Disquiet International literary contest, was selected by WIGLEAF for their 2016 best flash top list, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. Her novel All In is a finalist for the LANDO award from The de Groot Foundation 2023. Stambo has a master’s degree in Literature from Sofia University St. K. Ohridski, Bulgaria.

You can read an excerpt from A Bunch of Savages in The Common. Congratulations, Sofi!

Announcing the winner of the 2023 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing: Catharina Coenen for UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE!

October 2, 2023

Literary Hub is pleased to announce the winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which each year awards $10,000 and publication to a first-time, first-generation immigrant author, alternating yearly between fiction and nonfiction. The 2023 nonfiction prize goes to Catharina Coenen for a collection of essays, Unexploded Ordnance, which will be published by Restless Books in 2025. This year’s prize was judged by Grace Talusan, Jiaming Tang, and Ilan Stavans.

Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared on the Best American Essays Notable list as well as in literary magazines such as The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, and Best of the Net. Catharina is the recipient of creative nonfiction prizes from the Appalachian Review and from The Forge, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Residency.

About Unexploded Ordnance—the judges’ citation

What happens to the body after trauma? To the bodies of those descended from trauma? What becomes of desire that has been subsumed?

These are the questions that arise from this staggering collection of essays, one that brilliantly examines the legacy and inheritance of trauma in three generations of German women. The hurts and silences, ambitions and dignities of grandmothers, aunts, mothers, and daughters take center-stage, giving voice to a range of experiences that feel both timely and timeless. As Coenen reflects on how she came to her own queer identity, she does not shrink from examining her family’s past, sharing stories that implicate the suffering caused by her grandparents’ Nazi ties as a powerful act against secret-keeping.

Unexploded Ordnance invites the reader to think, perhaps for the first time, about the intersection of science, immigration, choice, and memory. Coenen’s perspective as a biologist informs how she brings the personal and political together, allowing the reader to see as a scientist, but through an artist’s gaze. And yet, beneath the strength of her voice—frank, tender, wise—there is a way in which her expertise disappears into the work itself.

Coenen also challenges our perception of what nonfiction can be. Her approach shows both an urgency and a formal inventiveness. No two essays feel the same, and yet there is a powerful sense of cohesion in the reading experience, as well as a sense of awe—the essays are themselves small grenades thrown against walls of silence, denial, and shame. If it is the duty of the scientist to explore the natural world, Coenen does it beautifully by turning her focus to our most basic makeup: the stories we carry in our genes. We are all beneficiaries of her courage and determination.

—Prize Judges Grace Talusan, Jiaming Tang, and Ilan Stavans

Catharina Coenen on her winning memoir

When I first moved to the U.S. from Germany for graduate school in botany, I was shocked by the ease with which many Americans joked about “Nazis.” Yet I could not explain that the word shook me to the core—claiming space for my emotions or for my family history felt inconceivable in the face of the suffering that my grandparents’ generation had caused.

Ten years ago, I took my first creative nonfiction class. I meant to write about plants, but every piece I wrote twisted itself into stories about my mother’s and grandmother’s experiences during World War II. The linked essays in Unexploded Ordnance examine how fascism, genocide, silence, and the bombs of World War II shaped three generations of women in my Catholic-German family and my life as a queer, first-generation immigrant.

Growing up in a country that started two world wars and was responsible for the Holocaust, I learned about Hitler and the concentration camps in school. But I never questioned why I woke up screaming from nightmares of fires and of trains, or why my teenage friends’ interest in boys struck me as odd. My mother was five at the end of the war. When I was young, she never talked about hiding in basements while bombs shook the walls, or about fleeing burnt-out cities in overcrowded trains, stuffed in the baggage net above her mother’s head. She never mentioned her months in an orphanage, or hiding her mother under the baby’s crib during the mass rapes committed by invading French soldiers across southern Germany. Decades after I moved to America, I fell in love with a woman. Amid the wreckage of my marriage, I remembered the wartime anecdotes my grandmother had dropped into my childhood like small grenades. I began to question my mother about her memories, and to tie them to what I had learned in school. Writing helped me to understand the link between my grandmother’s denial of my aunt’s mental illness and Nazi killings of disabled children in the first gas chambers. I learned how threats to disabled people, gay people, Jewish people, political dissidents, anyone labeled as “different,” had bent my life. Those threats persist, across borders, to this day.

To write and to publish has become my way to fulfill a promise I gave when I first entered the U.S. as a Fulbright student in 1989: to help nations understand each other, so they may live in peace.

Read an excerpt from Unexploded Ordnance in The Common.

Announcing the Finalists for the 2023 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing in Nonfiction

We are delighted to partner with The Common in announcing the four finalists for the 2023 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Since its inauguration in 2015, the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing has supported the voices of writers whose work brings fresh urgency to crossing cultural and linguistic divides, questions our sense of self in an increasingly interdependent world, and lends a voice to what it means to leave one home for another and why these stories need to be told. The winner will receive $10,000 and publication with Restless Books. This year’s judges—Grace Talusan, Jiaming (Andy) Tang, and Ilan Stavans—have selected the following four finalists.

How to be UnMothered by Camille U. Adams

Can abandonment be good luck if a mother turns out to be even worse? Narrated in poetic prose and the rhythmic patois of Trinidad and Tobago, How to be UnMothered reflects upon the multifaceted cruelties of a mother who subjects her daughters to neglect. It journeys from the aquamarine seas and lush greenery of Trinidad and Grenada to England, Canada, and New York City. It explores Caribbean history from pre-colonialism to the present, and questions what the author sees as the chokehold of African spirituality. In the end, it affirms the role of choice in determining multi-generational legacy. 

Read the excerpt here.

A Broken Russia Inside Me by A. Molotkov

Do we shape circumstances or are we shaped by them? A Broken Russia Inside Me is the story of a writer born into a totalitarian world and a tale of forging an identity outside what was given. At the age of twenty-two, Molotkov makes the decision to emigrate and, with $343 in cash, build a new life in the United States while the Soviet Union collapses and Russia is claimed by increasingly ominous leaders. He investigates what it means to be from a place he’s ashamed of and seeks to eradicate from within himself while also exploring how his choices and relationships still influence his attitudes and social responsibilities.

Read the excerpt here.

Unexploded Ordnance by Catharina Coenen

A collection of essays that interrogates what it means to come from a place where horror originates, and how terror can shape lives across generations, sometimes through our very DNA. Coenen, a doctor of biology, grew up in Germany and immigrated to the United States as an adult. Her mother, who had been five at the end of WWII, never talked about sheltering in basements while bombs shook the walls, fleeing burnt-out cities stuffed in the baggage net of overcrowded trains, or hiding her own mother under her sister’s crib during the mass rapes committed by invading French soldiers. After Coenen falls in love with a woman and begins to disentangle her twenty-year marriage to a man, the wartime anecdotes her grandmother shared throughout her childhood reappear like small grenades. With time, she comes to understand how historical threats to anyone labeled as “different”—Jewish people, disabled people, gay people, political dissidents—still bend her life, just as those threats persist across borders today.

Read the excerpt here.

Radio Big Mouth by Ana Hebra Flaster

Ana Hebra Flaster was five years old when her family fled post-revolutionary Cuba. They landed in a New Hampshire mill town, but she grew up Cuban-style, in a bright yellow duplex full of viejos—cousins, dogs, canaries. The women in her family worked hard to keep their Cuban identity alive, and they created a new family story: they’d won. They’d beaten Castro and Communism. Flaster believed those stories. But as an adult, when her own daughter turned five, a deep depression appeared. What traumas had lodged themselves in her when her family was uprooted from Cuba? For many refugees, she writes, refugee-dom never ends, even when you’ve scrubbed your accent and learned to like food that tastes like it was washed first. This book is a love letter to that story.

Read the excerpt here.

Congratulations to Camille U. Adams, Catharina Coenen, Ana Hebra Flaster, and A. Molotkov! We are deeply grateful for your work. Many thanks as well to the judges, who brought much insight and heart to their deliberations, and to everyone who shared their writing with us this year. 

Read excerpts from all of the finalists over at The Common!

And please stay tuned for news of our 2021 New Immigrant Writing Prize–winning memoir, An Unruled Body by Ani Gjika, whose book is exactly two months away from its publication day! Preorder a copy now, and be sure to check out all the past prizewinners on our website!