The James Jones First Novel Fellowship has selected Emma Binder from Wisconsin, as the 2025 Fellow for their novel, Small Heaven. The first runner-up is Sandy Nietling of West Michigan for her novel, Black River. The second runner-up is DJ Kim of New York City for her novel The Matron Deity of Jawado Island.
The competition is co-sponsored annually by the James Jones Literary Society and the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University.
EMMA BINDER
As Fellow, Binder was awarded $12,000. They have received a Stegner Fellowship in fiction from Stanford University, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. For their short stories, they have received an O. Henry Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, and a Wisconsin Writers Award, among other honors. Their fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories 2025, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
SANDY NIETLING
First runner-up Nietling, awarded $3,000, is a Pushcart-nominated writer. She’s the winner of the First Pages Prize for Fiction, judged by Edwidge Danticat. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Quarter After Eight, and New Ohio Review. She is currently working on her second novel.
DJ KIM
Second runner-up, Kim was awarded $2,000. She is an immigrant writer based in New York City. She holds an MA in English from Seton Hall University and MFA in fiction from CUNY Brooklyn College. She won the South Wind Thesis Prize and the Himan Brown Award for her short fiction. She has received support from Tin House workshops, Kundiman, and One Story. She is currently working on her first novel about South Korea’s sea women (haenyeo) while living on Jeju Island and learning freediving.
The James Jones First Novel Fellowship was established in 1992 to “honor the spirit of unblinking honesty, determination, and insight into modern culture as exemplified by (the writings of) James Jones.” Jones was the author of From Here to Eternity as well as the novels Some Came Running and The Thin Red Line, among others.
Final judges for the 2025 Fellowship were: Nancy McKinley, Ph.D., a founding member of the fiction faculty at the Maslow Family Creative Writing Program, a novelist and short story writer whose latest novel is St. Christopher on Pluto; Taylor Polites, MFA, who teaches creative writing at the Maslow Family Creative Writing Program and the Rhode Island School of Design, and is the author of the novel, The Rebel Wife, and Mary Kay Zuravleff, MFA, whohas taught writing at American University, the Chautauqua Institution, Johns Hopkins and George Mason universities. She is a past winner of the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Her latest novel is American Ending.
THE JAMES JONES 