The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award honors an outstanding debut novel published in the preceding calendar year. Symbolized by a three-dimensional compass, the Award is a tribute to writers who have navigated their way through the maze of imagination—who have invented their own compasses and created characters, plots, and voices to enliven the common hours.

In short, each winner delivers a great read. Each one takes the reader someplace new.

The diverse winning novelists have written books that may be funny or sad, wisecracky or heartrending, but each is powerful enough in its own way to have moved the initial readers and final judges toward the conclusion that, among a field of roughly a hundred submissions annually, this writer has achieved something notable and enduring: art.