Best Debut Short Stories 2025: The Pen America Dau Prize

The essential annual guide to the newest voices in literature

Best Debut Short Stories celebrates the most promising short story writers today. Selected by a panel of distinguished judges, these eight stories are the 2025 winners of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, which recognizes outstanding debuts published in literary magazines.

Each story is accompanied by an introduction from the journal editor who first published it, providing insight about what’s exciting in fiction right now, and recognizing the vital work literary magazines do in nurturing new voices.

LYDI CONKLIN is the author of Rainbow Rainbow, which was long-listed for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Their fiction has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, and The Paris Review. They’ve drawn comics for The New Yorker, The Believer, Lenny Letter, and other publications. Songs of No Provenance is their first novel.

DIONNE IRVING is the author of the novel Quint and the story collection The Islands. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, Literary Hub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Irving teaches in the Creative Writing Program and the Initiative on Race and Resilience at the University of Notre Dame.

BRENDA PEYNADO is the author of the The Rock Eaters. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Literary Award, selection for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Best Small Fictions, a Dana Award, and a Fulbright grant to the Dominican Republic. Her fiction appears in The Georgia Review, The Sun (London), The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and more than forty other journals.