VCU’s Cabell First Novelist Award is awarded annually to a debut novel that bends the bounds of imagination to produce a creative literary experience. One book is chosen from more than  200 contestants by the MFA English students and a judging panel organized by VCU Libraries and the English Department. The winning author will be honored with a reading at James Branch Cabell Library in fall 2025 and a chance to share their experience with the VCU community. Here are the 10 finalists.  

Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel

A wild ride through the minds of eight teenage boxers at the Daughters of America national tournament, this novel careens through the hidden emotional battles that play out in the ring. Guilt, determination and social pressure force each participant to grapple with herself in a narrative as unsteady and reeling as the battles that dominate its pages.

Scaffolding, Lauren Elkin

Two couples inhabit the same Parisian apartment, 50 years apart, grappling with the same issue of creating a home. Political upheaval, Jaques Lacan, and many cups of tea pass through this romantic, psychoanalytic trip that anchors itself through the peeling wallpaper and chipped paint of a 70 meter one-bedroom.

How It Works Out, Myriam Lacroix

Sardonically sweet, Lacroix spins the story of Myriam and Allison’s lesbian relationship – over and over again, in a myriad of wild hypotheticals. Bordering on the absurd, from stolen babies to B-list celebs, the couple works out their relationship in hilarious vignettes that test the limits of possibility and passion.

The Book of Love, Kelly Link

Three kids die, and are then resurrected in a fluke of Bogomil, the demonic dog-god of death. They are given a chance to return to reality in the form of three trials orchestrated by their mysterious high school music teacher. Weird and melodious, the epic is a rather strange testament to the complicated feelings that bind us together.

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken

This novella traces the philosophical pangs of a lonely zombie in a seemingly unremarkable afterlife. Like the hordes of the undead surrounding her, she is left with no name, spotty memories, and a deeply unstable sense of self – further complicated upon the addition of an animate dead crow sewed into her stomach.

I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both, Mariah Stovall

A sudden letter from an estranged friend after ten years of radio silence throws Khaki Oliver’s uneventful life into disarray. Her friendship with Fiona was gratifying, yes, but also ruinous. Khaki constructs a mixtape to face the choice, revisiting her past through the punk scene they inhabited and the disorienting memories that come tumbling back.

Fire Exit, Morgan Talty

Charles has watched his daughter’s life unfold on the Penobscot Reservation from the other side of the river, raised by her mother and stepfather in a beneficial lie that grants her the label of Penobscot citizenship on the official census. Now that Elizabeth is grown up, Charles wonders if she should know the truth – and whose it is to share.

Cinema Love, Jiaming Tang

Three storylines weave together to tell the lives of Old Second and Bao Mei, a married couple initially bound by their connection to a movie theater that shelters cruising gay men in rural China. Yet their secret lives propel a move to New York’s Chinatown, a rapidly changing landscape in which they must build a life.

Ours, Phillip B. Williams

In the 1830s, conjuring woman Saint sweeps through the American South and magically destabilizes plantations, leading enslaved people to a safe place sheltered from the control of White outsiders: the town of Ours. Ten years in the making and massive in scope, this epic tracks the town for the next 200 years in a surreal reinvention of America’s past and lens into its present.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In, John Wiswell 

A fantastical horror novel about a fearsome shapeshifter becomes a…romance? When the monstrous Shesheshen is nursed back to health by a human woman, she must grapple with the ires of not parasitically impregnating her girlfriend (who just so happens to be a monster hunter) and how to get along with her vitriolically anti-monster in-laws.