The Washington Writers’ Publishing House is thrilled to announce the 2024 winners of its annual poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction manuscript contest: Varun Gauri for his novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, Megan Doney (WFYP, June 2008) for her memoir Unarmed, and Chanlee Luu for her poetry collection The Machine Autocorrects Code to I.

Varun Gauri was born in India and raised in the American Midwest. After studying philosophy in college and public policy in graduate school, he worked for more than two decades on global poverty and human rights, publishing academic articles and books on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. His short fiction was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He was a Summer Writer-in-Residence at Washington, DC’s the Inner Loop. For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus is his first novel.

Megan Doney teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at New River Community College in Virginia. Her work has appeared in Ilanot Review, Rappahannock Review, Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals, as well as the anthologies Allegheny and If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. Doney was a Fullbright fellow in South Africa in 2007, and returned there in 2015 to study reconciliation and public narrative in the aftermath of violence. She earned an MFA from Lesley University. Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir is her first book.

Chanlee Luu is a Vietnamese-Chinese American writer from Martinsville, VA, currently residing in Roanoke, VA. She received her MFA in creative writing at Hollins University and BS in chemical engineering and minor in Global Sustainability from the University of Virginia, where she competed in poetry slams.