The winner of our 2026 Petrichor Prize
I never set out to be a writer. From the time I was very young, I wanted to be a painter, took special weekend art classes and read as much as I could about art history, but when I got to UCLA, the film department is what drew me. Stories about Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek could still be heard in the hallways and more importantly, I’d begun to feel I needed words for something I couldn’t yet articulate. I made my thesis film on the iconic feminist artist Judy Chicago at the beginning of her career.
Soon after I graduated, I fell into magazine writing as a way to pay the rent from the example of an older friend and the articles came easily. Like everyone who graduates film school, I also wanted to write a screenplay, but about what? Then it came to me — the Manhattan Project. My physicist father had worked on the Manhattan Project, but died of radiation-induced cancer when I was very young. I hadn’t thought of him in years; now researching the project, and his part in it, became my doorway to real writing and most importantly to him.
I got a US Rail Pass and traveled across the country to every place he had ever lived or worked interviewing people he knew, but back home the writing was difficult. It stirred up long-buried grief and whatever I felt couldn’t be put into a commercial Hollywood mold. In frustration, I began writing short stories. A few years later when a friend suggested I apply to the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, the stories were strong enough to get me in.
I’ve been called a late bloomer and in some ways that’s true but it also isn’t. In the same way that actors need full access to their emotional range, writers do also, and because of the death of my father and other things, at first that was difficult for me. On the other hand, I began to publish fiction and essays soon after I graduated from Warren Wilson. My debut collection of short fiction The Calamity of Desire and Other Stories touches back to my first love of art, each story based on a famous work of art or artist and won the Best Short Story Collection for 2025 from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. I started The Remedy of Light to be another story in that collection, but somehow it morphed into a novel, and now it has won the Petrichor Prize and is being published by Regal House!
My fiction and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Creative Nonfiction, Hong Kong Review and elsewhere. In addition to the Petrichor Prize and prize from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, my awards include a Pushcart Prize nomination and the 2025 Larry Levis Prize for my novel-in-progress The Error Rate of Living Things, based on my father’s life and my search for him. I have received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program where I was the McElwee Family Fellow.
I live in Northeast Los Angeles and teach writing at Los Angeles City College. Occasionally I take art classes.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Judith Dancoff’s The Remedy of Light in 2028.
