The Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction
Ploughshares is pleased to present Juliana Lamy with the eighth annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for her short story “My Country Full of Thieves,” which appeared in the Fall 2025 staff-edited longform issue. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short story published in the journal from the previous year.
Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer from South Florida. She is the author of You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of Red Hen Press’s 2021 Ann Petry Award, winner of the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction, and longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize as well as the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Fiction.
Ploughshares Managing Editor Rachel Dillon wrote the following questions for Lamy about her story and process.
Rachel Dillon: In Independent Book Review, Genevieve Hartman describes your debut short story collection, You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023), as “unflinching” and “elegant,” “infused with Haitian culture and mysticism, yet enmeshed with violence.” How do you see your Bourne Prize-winning story, “My Country Full of Thieves,” in conversation with this earlier work? How might it depart?
Juliana Lamy: In some ways, I think of “My Country Full of Thieves” as an amalgamation of the elements that I most enjoyed writing in the story collection: Black/Haitian mischief, wild, meandering, observational lists, dialogue that never seeks to replicate actual speech but to circle around it (and to borrow from it only when absolutely necessary). In other ways, I think of “My Country … ” as a complete digression from the stories in the collection. I say this because I could not have written “My Country … ” three years ago (when the collection was published), just as I could not write any of the stories in the collection right now. As a fiction writer, one of the things that continues to fill me with awe is how every piece that a writer produces is a written testament to the motions of the writer’s mind at a particular point in time, or a particular life stage. Lately, I’ve been reading the complete works of individual writers like Patrick Chamoiseau and Toni Morrison for just this reason.
RD: One of the most striking and wonderful elements of this story is the strong voice of its narrator, Nika, and the way she describes her daily life. Tell us about how you arrived at this voice, and how your protagonists’ voices take shape throughout your drafting process.
JL: I’ve started to say that in an ideal world, where my parents and millions of other Haitians were not pushed from their home countries by historical and geopolitical forces out of their control, all of my stories would be in Haitian Creole. That is the language in which stories first came to me through my mother, who always had fables on hand for when school and work were cancelled for south Florida hurricanes. Haitian Creole is also the language where my personality is at its most exuberant. But English was the first written language that I encountered, and it’s the one in which most of my favorite authors write. “My Country … ” is a story where I’m attempting to reconcile these two truths with each other. With Nika’s narratorial voice, I’m attempting to fit the English language to Haitian Creole syntax, witticism, and sensibility.
RD: Our staff and local community members had the pleasure of hearing you read “My Country Full of Thieves” at our Fall 2025 issue launch. I was particularly struck by the humor and energy of the piece—elements that are magnified when the story is read aloud. Can you talk about the role of humor, which can be so difficult to write, in your work?
JL: Oh, I put humor at the center of my work! This is not to say that I’m always attempting to be funny, but I think that the lifeblood of humor is absurdism. For me, to be Haitian in Haiti or abroad is to make frequent encounters with the absurd—absurdly lively, absurdly tragic, absurdly funny, absurdly moving. My preoccupation with absurdity comes from my desire to write about a people—my people—for whom the world is habitually unreasonable. We understand the ins and outs of extremity, of irony and dichotomy, of incongruity, of the section of the wishbone where tragedy and comedy meet and fuse. I am always writing with an eye on that sort of cultural understanding.
RD: This story is formally inventive in its run-on, stream-of-consciousness narration; as if punctuation and form are as tedious to Nika as her job picking oranges. What writers, artists, and thinkers influence your work, particularly as it relates to form?
JL: While I was working on my thesis manuscript in the second year of my MFA at Iowa, one of my instructors—Jamel Brinkley—suggested a novel to me that pretty much broke my brain. It was Texaco (1992) by the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, this decades-long epic that is set in Martinique and tells the story of a woman called Marie-Sophie Laborieux who builds a sprawling shantytown called Texaco outside of Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France. At the sentence level, this work—and all of Chamoiseau’s work—has some of the most lyrical, inventive, jaw-droppingly beautiful writing I have ever encountered. But particularly, there is a celebration of the French Creole developed by Martinique’s formerly enslaved population, as well as an honoring of absurdism and of lyricism for lyricism’s sake, that I will always, always find moving. There is nothing like engaging with art that feels so spiritually and emotionally immense that it leaves you with no other choice but to create. I am drawn to artists whose works have narratorial or poetic voices that make me feel this way, fiction writers like Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Arundhati Roy, and Vladimir Nabokov; poets like Danez Smith and Eileen Myles; musicians like D’Angelo.
RD: What questions, obsessions, or areas of research continue to arise in your writing? What projects can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?
JL: I am obsessed with chronicling the psychic weight of existing as a Haitian person of little means, particularly as this pertains to Haitian immigrants. I think that when many (though of course not all) non-Haitian people mention the vibrancy of Haitian life and culture, it amounts to little more than a platitude meant to quickly move the conversation away from the elements of Haitianness that have so long caused such unjust global revulsion and anxiety: the revolution, vodou, the poverty, the preservation of many French cultural modes despite the country’s vehement renouncement of French control. I want to write work that concerns these topics, work that constantly opens up new avenues of interest for myself and for the people who so graciously spend their time with my writing. I am also interested in writing about how fictional Haitian characters encounter these topics, and how absurdism/humor might arise during these encounters. Right now, I am currently at work on a novel that deals heavily with Haitian/African ancestral religions, the Haitian Revolution, and dissolution of the Duvalier regime in the 1980s.
