Lara Mimosa Montes ’09 Wins Prestigious Whiting Award
SUNY Purchase alum Lara Mimosa Montes won a 2026 Whiting Award for Fiction, which recognizes emerging writers.
Lara Mimosa Montes ’09 (Literature) won a 2026 Whiting Award for Fiction, a $50,000 prize given annually by the Whiting Foundation to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
The Whiting Foundation supports creative writing through the Whiting Awards based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.
The selection committee writes,
“Lara Mimosa Montes adeptly slows time to explore interiority and liminal territories. Her work is formally innovative and plays with the possibilities of narration, all while being fully tangible, present. Montes is daring, her work unafraid to wrestle with the most complex and foundational ideas, yet doing so on her own terms.”
Montes is a writer, editor, and teaching artist whose practice and experiences span the fields of alternative publishing and experimental writing.
She is most recently the author of The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway, 2025), as well as two previous poetry books, THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020) and The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press, 2016).
She is a faculty member of the Creative Writing MFA program at Pacific Northwest College of Art and also teaches in the XE: Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement Master’s program at NYU.