Phoenix, Arizona(USA): Indian American author Keya Mitra has won the 2024 Summer Nonfiction Essay Contest hosted by Prairie Schooner, a prominent literary journal published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Mitra's award-winning essay, Bruised and Glorious, delves into the emotional and physical aspects of storytelling, focusing on resilience, healing, and the communal experiences that shape personal narratives.

The essay, part of her memoir-in-essays manuscript titled Almost Born, tackles themes such as struggles with fertility, chronic illness, and the healing found through the Camino Santiago pilgrimages. Mitra will be awarded a $1,000 prize, and her essay will be featured in the Spring 2025 edition of Prairie Schooner.

Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner showcases a variety of works, including fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews, from both emerging and established authors around the world.

The contest was judged by Safiya Sinclair, an acclaimed poet and creative writing professor at Arizona State University. She described the essay as “a love letter to the way language connects us, and gifts us a roadmap to ourselves; a way back to the home we thought we’d lost.” Sinclair praised the essay's vivid language and exploration of how our bodies—through illness, alienation, and colonial trauma—can become sites of exile. She commended Mitra's work as a powerful example of how collective storytelling fosters healing and self-understanding.

Keya Mitra, an award-winning professor at Pacific University, holds both an MFA and a doctorate from the University of Houston. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review and earned notable mentions in Best American Short Stories 2018. She has also won the 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the 2022 Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities, which supported her research in Meghalaya, India. A Fulbright grant recipient, Mitra is currently working on her novel Immigrant Delay Disease.