Jeffrey Condran Named 2026 Porter Fund Literary Prize Recipient

Jeffrey Condran, associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has been named the 2026 winner of the Porter Fund Literary Prize, one of Arkansas’s longstanding literary honors.

The award honors an Arkansas writer whose substantial body of work merits greater recognition. For Condran, who has been at UA Little Rock for more than a decade, the honor also reflects the literary community he has helped build since moving to Arkansas.

“I was shocked and excited. Learning that Kevin Brockmeier had nominated me made it even more meaningful because he’s a writer whose work I admired before I came to Arkansas,” he said. “It’s humbling to know that he thought my work was worth recognizing. I think this recognition is about my writing, but it’s also about being a good literary citizen in Arkansas and supporting my students. It feels like a career award as much as anything else.”

Brockmeier, who won the Porter Prize in 2003, nominated him for this year’s award. He said Condran’s fiction is outstanding but hasn’t reached a wider audience, yet, which is exactly the kind of writer the Porter Prize aims to recognize.

At UA Little Rock, Condran’s work as a writer and teacher continually inform each another. As a creative writing professor, he said working with students pushes him to keep learning about writing, while his own experience as a writer shapes how he approaches teaching.

“I think teaching creative writing makes me learn about writing all the time,” Condran said. “Every time I teach a class, I change the syllabus. I’m constantly learning about new writers, new approaches, and new ways of thinking about writing.”

Watching his students develop as writers is one of the most meaningful parts of teaching for Condran, and many of his students have gone on to publish their work or pursue graduate study. One of those former students is Jared Lemus, whose debut short story collection, Guatemalan Rhapsody, received the 2026 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Lemus’ success is one example of the continued growth he hopes to see from his students after they leave the classroom.

“I feel like their success is my success,” he said. “I love spending time with my students, and I love introducing them to new writers and new ways of thinking.”

For Condran, this recognition carries particular meaning because of the relationship he has developed with Arkansas since moving from Pittsburgh in 2015.

“I didn’t know what it would be like to move a thousand miles away, but Arkansas has been really good to me,” he said. “I could tell, not long after arriving, that there were things about Arkansas and the South that I wanted to write about. It’s a great honor to receive recognition of my work by my adopted home. It’s safe to say that my career has definitely flowered here.”

His involvement in the Arkansas literary community extends beyond the university. He has served on the planning committee for the Six Bridges Book Festival, founded the small press Braddock Avenue Books, and co-founded the Zeitgeist Reading Series.

Condran’s writing spans novels, short stories, and ekphrastic flash fiction — short stories inspired or responding to a visual work of art. His published work includes the novel Prague Summer and the story collections A Fingerprint Repeated and Claire, Wading Into the Danube by Night. His short story “Beggar” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, while “Praha” won the 2010 William Peden Prize. He is currently working on Face to the Sun, a novel about the final year of Franz Kafka’s life, while also developing a collection of ekphrastic flash fiction inspired by Arkansas art, history, and nature.

“I feel, you know, I live in this beautiful place, and I’m surrounded by people who are interesting and educated and creative, and who have done nothing but support my career since I got here,” he said. “Arkansas has been a place where my life has been almost entirely focused on creative writing in a way that it had not been in the past, and I’m very grateful for that.”

The Porter Fund Literary Prize will be presented to Condran during “A Prized Evening,” a joint celebration of the Porter Fund Literary Prize and the Booker Worthen Literary Prize, on Oct. 2 at the Central Arkansas Library System Main Library in downtown Little Rock. The event is free and open to the public.