Author Bryan Washington has been chosen as winner of the 2019 Ernest J. Gaines Award for his debut story collection Lot.

Now in its 13th year, the Ernest J. Gaines Award is a prize given annually by Baton Rouge Area Foundation donors to recognize outstanding work from promising African-American fiction writers, while honoring the late Louisiana native Ernest Gaines’ contribution to the literary world.

Lot: Stories by Bryan Washington

In the city of Houston – a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America – the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He’s working at his family’s restaurant, weathering his brother’s blows, resenting his older sister’s absence. And discovering he likes boys.

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.