UK’s Crystal Wilkinson selects inaugural winners of Screen Door Press

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Dec. 9, 2024) — Screen Door Press, dedicated to discovering unique, exceptional and varied voices within Black literary traditions, has announced its two inaugural winners: Avery Irons and Toni Ann Johnson. The new imprint published by the University Press of Kentucky will award a $5,000 prize to each author.

Edited by critically acclaimed author, former Kentucky Poet Laureate and UK English Professor Crystal Wilkinson, Ph.D., Screen Door Press celebrates the very best in fiction — short stories, novellas and novels — across a broad range of categories. Presented in partnership with the Thomas D. Clark Foundation, the selected titles will be published in 2026.

In her anticipated novel, Avery Irons presents stories of resilience among Black queer individuals during the early 20th century. This skillfully woven narrative follows one family’s intergenerational experience of the Great Migration — from the time of enslavement, through the development of a freedman’s town, and to one young woman’s journey to the big city and back. Irons’ evocative and lyrical prose builds a world in which complicated characters try to care for one another in a country that does not care about them. The novel’s dialogue jumps off the page and rings with a truth that lingers.

“I am thankful to find a home at the University Press of Kentucky for a book about lives so often relegated to the shadows and lost to history despite the beauty, reflections and lessons they offer us in the modern era,” Irons said.

Irons was born and raised in Central Illinois. Her novella “Glass Men” won Big Fiction Magazine’s Novella Prize in 2016. Her short fiction has appeared in the African American Review, Ragazine.cc and Sinister Wisdom. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Irons resides in Albany, New York.

Toni Ann Johnson’s linked short story collection, which is a follow-up to her previous book “Light Skin Gone to Waste,” explores a family’s often painful life as light-skinned Black people in a predominantly white community. Through multiple points of view which travel from the 1960s to 2022, Johnson’s collection invites readers into the lives of an eldest daughter longing for her father’s affection while she educates herself towards independence, of a youngest daughter trying to relinquish childhood pain in a quest for music and love, of a mother battling mental illness while raising children in a place that rejects them, and a father practicing psychology while sleeping with the white women of the town. Innovative and narratively rich, this book evokes deep human feeling and asks important social questions.

“It’s a spectacular honor to have my forthcoming linked story collection selected as an inaugural Screen Door Press/University Press of Kentucky release,” Johnson said. “Crystal Wilkinson is a brilliant writer, a generous mentor, and the embodiment of a stellar literary citizen. I’m beaming with joy at my good fortune to be edited by Ms. Wilkinson, and for the opportunity to work with the wonderfully supportive press team.”

Johnson is the winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction with “Light Skin Gone to Waste” edited by Roxane Gay. Johnson’s novella “Homegoing” was a semifinalist for the William Faulkner Wisdom Award in fiction and won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest in 2020. Johnson’s novel “Remedy For a Broken Angel” earned her a 2015 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. She resides in Los Angeles.

The next call for submissions for Screen Door Press will open March 1 and run through April 15.