2025 Winner
Winner: Brittany Perham
Executrix
Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W. W. Norton), which received the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (Slapering Hol Press). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. New work may be found or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches creative writing at Endicott College.
Cheryl Strayed, judge: “Executrix is a moving, wise, innovative memoir that captures the experience of loving and losing a complicated parent with such precision and power it lands like a truth bomb on the heart. In lean and vivid prose that’s at turns comic and devastating, poignant and provocative, the author reckons not only with her late father, but also with memory and the form of memoir itself. Masterfully crafted, Executrix is a complex, emotionally exacting, beautiful book that held me in its thrall from page 1.”
Runner-up: Mel Williams
LITTLE FLAMES UNDER MY SKIN
Strayed: “LITTLE FLAMES UNDER MY SKIN is a riveting, harrowing, and profoundly inspiring book about how the author survived and ultimately thrived after she was struck by a sudden, debilitating illness in the prime of her life. With astonishing intimacy, honesty, and insight, the author writes about the fearsome vulnerability of being a patient on the brink of death, about the long and painful process of recovering the most basic bodily functions, about grieving the life altered and the career, home, and marriage that were lost due to her illness, and—perhaps most importantly—it’s about how she fought every day to rebuild her life anew, one brave breath at a time. I’ll never forget this powerfully illuminating memoir.”