After a hiatus, THE KENNETH PATCHEN AWARD was revived in 2012. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2012, the Award was reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and it honors the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year.
Current award details and submission information are at our Kenneth Patchen Award hub.l.
KENNETH PATCHEN is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake, The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been benchmarks for beats, postmodernists and innovators of all ilks, inspiring younger writers to greater significance and innovation in their own work.
A Is for Everyone subverts the children's-alphabet-book format. Every letter routes back to "A," and inside that frame Dennis Vanderspek layers surreal parables, anthropomorphic fables, prose-poem ...
Between the Legs is the novel that won the 2015 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. The novel moves geographically: a couple travels from the Buchenwald concentration camp through Weima...
How to Break Article Noun is a carefully crafted work consisting of seven parts, with seven chapters each, intricately interwoven to make up for the absence of a plot. The 2012 Patchen judge, Yuriy...
Mouth is Charles Hood's novel, illustrated throughout by Christine Mugnolo, and the only work of fiction Hood has published. The premise is small and unstable: two lovers at the entrance to a fragi...
Oppression for the Heaven of It is a dialogue-driven novel about a son and a mother. The novel is drawn from the author's experience as the mother of a painter who lived his adult life with paranoi...
Out of Competition is a comedy set inside a film festival that is itself out of competition.
The setting is a thinly veiled Cannes on the French Riviera. A failing Hollywood producer moves through ...
Own Little Worlds is a political dark comedy set in post-Trump America. A bomb destroys a Japanese cargo ship in the port of Jacksonville four days before a presidential election, and a retired edi...
The entry fee for the Patchen Award is $25. It can be paid here. If you need to use an alternate form of payment, please email us at egerdes@experimentalfiction.com for other options.
Plague City, Genelle Chaconas's first novel, won the 2019 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel.
The book is a William S. Burroughs-style cut-up that reads as much like poetry as fiction. ...
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RED GIRL JUMPING is a fable-like memoir by Kim Merrill, a New York playwright. It is the story of Kimberly, a grown woman, and Red Girl, a shard of ...
Return to Circa '96 is built like the institution it is about: its chapters are ordered by Dewey Decimal. The premise is a single year in the life of a small-town public library meeting the World W...
The Makings of a Nobody is the novel that won Ann Z. Leventhal the 2022 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. Leventhal calls the form a fictmoir, a memoir-fiction crossover, and the book...
