The James Jones First Novel Fellowship has selected Caroline Kim of California as the 2026 Fellow for her novel, The Three Min Queens. The first runner-up is Lena Inglis of Brooklyn, N.Y., for her novel, Before the Morning Comes. There was no second runner-up selected this year.
The competition is co-sponsored annually by the James Jones Literary Society and the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. There were 575 submissions this year.
Kim was awarded $12,000. She is the author of The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, winner of the 2020 Drue Heinz Prize in Literature, finalist for a Northern California Book Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in Fiction, and long listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and The Story Prize. In 2024, her story, “Hiding Spot,” which appeared in The New England Review, was selected for the O. Henry Prize Winners 2024.
She is also the recipient of Litmag’s Anton Chekov Award for Flash Fiction, a Work-Study Scholarship from Bread Loaf, and a Kundiman Fellowship from Sewanee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Georgia Review, Story, New England Review, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, The Michigan Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.
Inglis was awarded $3,000. She is a first-generation Saint Lucian American writer and cultural strategist based in Brooklyn. Her work explores culture, identity, memory, and the ways people make meaning of the worlds they inherit. A graduate of Baruch College with a degree in Business Journalism, Inglis has built a career across arts, media, and cultural organizations in New York City. Drawing from her Caribbean heritage and a deep interest in history and storytelling traditions, she writes fiction concerned with the forces that shape families, communities, and belonging.
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 2026 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; Eskor David Johnson, Assistant Professor, Creative Writing at Stony Brook University and author of Pay As You Go, an NPR Best Book of the Year and Barbara J. Taylor, novelist and author of Sing in the Morning, Cry at Night, which Publishers Weekly named a “Best Book of Summer (2014).
THE JAMES JONES 