Today, the DAG Foundation announced the seven finalists for the DAG Prize for Literature, which grants $20,000 to “an early-career prose writer whose work expands the possibilities for American writing.” The prize, now in its second year, is given by musicians Alyssa and Douglas Graham (who also award annual prizes to musicians and visual artists), and seeks to champion “significant innovation,” and support the second prose project of an under-recognized writer.
Here are the seven finalists, chosen from a pool of 220 applications, and their bios:
Marcus Clayton is a multigenre Afrolatino writer who holds a PhD in Literature andCreative Writing from the University of Southern California, and an MFA in Poetry from California State University, Long Beach. His inter-genre story collection, ¡PÓNK!, was published in 2025. His project, Can I Live?: 13 Afro(Latine) Punk Essays, is a coming-of-age collection of pop-culture criticism and personal narratives traversing the author’s formative years in South Gate, CA, through present day adulthood, navigating the center of being black, Latino, and a punk. Told in a series of fragmented prose and other experimental forms to interrogate race, masculinity, love, media, and the term “afro-punk,” the book asks whether it is the name we are given or the names we need that best answer the question “Can I live?” with an emphatic “Yes!”
