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Caroline Bock/wwphpress@gmail.com
WASHINGTON WRITERS’ PUBLISHING HOUSE ANNOUNCES
THE WINNER OF ITS 2025 FICTION PRIZE
December 23, 2025, Washington DC – VILLAINS by Samantha Neugebauer is the winner of the 2025 Fiction Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. This debut short story collection will be published on January 26, 2027.
Featuring fourteen stories, this collection is full of quiet and determined characters who inhabit loud and busy locales. An American woman is left stuck in her late husband’s Italian village, surrounded by the whispers of the neighbors and the judgments of her mother-in-law. In Philadelphia, a woman living with her declining mother buys a book of villanelles and becomes engrossed in writing a poem of her own. Through characters who lose and fear, who long for enchantment, purpose, or love, Neugebauer explores what it means to misread one’s world—to mistake the scope of our lives, to confuse what is large or small, meaningful or illusory.
Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at NYU, Washington, D.C., and serves as senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly. Her writing has appeared in Vassar Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Offing, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and other places. A first-generation college graduate, she holds an M.F.A. from Johns Hopkins University and degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and New York University. For nearly a decade, Samantha taught writing and worked in academic programming across NYU’s global campuses, including in the United Arab Emirates, England, Germany, Greece, and Italy. Originally from Philadelphia, Samantha now lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, baby, and two cats.
“These stories feature quiet and determined voices taking stock of their lives unfolding on the edges of grand locales. They explore the redemptive powers of a literature that absorbs and yet stands outside of real life—what art promises, what it delivers, what it can never quite replace. This is a splendid collection about the consolations we fashion out of longing,” noted Varun Gauri, award-winning author of the novel For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus.
A sample from the title story, VILLAINS, can be read below:
Back then, it was impossible to do anything with my mother sleeping. In the evenings, we
watched Prancer and ate turkey clubs oozing with mayonnaise. In the mornings, we drank coffee
followed by spicy Bloody Marys. In the afternoons, while I worked, she liked to sleep, so I
schemed to thwart her efforts (I did, however, celebrate my mother’s condition in the abstract).
I’d give her small tasks; send her out for a forever stamp, or to Dunkin Donuts, or to pick up her
prescriptions at CVS, easy things like that. My bank account had become anorexic, so we kept
our overhead low.
It was a transitional time for us both. My mother, sixty, had recently gone on disability after an
injury at her job. I, thirty, had moved back after working abroad for ten years, although no one
was interested, so I tried not to think about it.
In general, my mother was more maudlin than me, while I was more calculated. What my mother
saw as human nature, I saw as flaws in a design. I couldn’t help it, I’d gone to college. She was a
size twelve and me, a sixteen going on twenty. Still, for the most part, we could wear each
other’s clothes. Sizes, like everything, had become negotiable. We missed my father, my brother,
and her parents, also Walter, my best friend from high school, and Byron and Flake, our family
dogs (miniature Border Collies), and Agnes, her childhood cat. Less so, we missed my father’s parents, my mother’s sister, the other aunts and uncles, and the parakeets. Not because we didn’t love them: only we had to draw the line somewhere.
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In 2027, The Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH), will publish three award-winning poetry collections, including one work in translation, as well as this award-winning collection of fiction. This record number of publications was announced in a year that marked WWPH’s 50th anniversary and in which WWPH published its most ambitious anthology to date, AMERICA’S FUTURE: poetry & prose in response to tomorrow, which is edited by Caroline Bock and Jona Colson and features 164 writers in 179 works over 576 pages. The anthology is now available in trade paperback and ebook.
The Washington Writers’ Publishing House is the longest, continuously operating cooperative nonprofit literary press in the United States. More about the Washington Writers’ Publishing House can be found at www.washingtonwriters.org