Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction: $2,500 and publication by the University of Georgia Press

2026 Judge

Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by The New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. Laymon is the recipient of a 2020–2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon has also written City Summer, Country Summer and is at work on Good God and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, aimed at aiding young people in Jackson to get more comfortable reading, writing, revising, and sharing on their own terms, in their own communities. He is the cohost of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

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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.”

2025 Finalists

ELECTRIC YOUTH by Jennifer Anderson
THERE WERE LEMONS IN THE MULLED WINE, OR MORE LIKELY IT WAS ORANGES: ESSAYS by Jax Connelly
ALMOST BORN: A MEMOIR-IN-CHAPTERS by Keya Mitra
BRAIN CELL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF CONCUSSION by Kristin Moran
THE PROBLEM OF HAPPINESS by Colleen Morton Busch
THE ASIAN VACATION by Benjamin “Fan Gao” Ren
ONLY THE STARS DIVIDE US: A MEMOIR by Nada Siddiqui
MAYBE WE’VE BEEN TRYING FOR LIFETIMES by Tria Wen

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The Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Winner:Caroline Crew
Other Girls to Burn, University of Georgia Press

Caroline Crew is the author of PINK MUSEUM (Big Lucks), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays appear in Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at Georgia State University, after earning an MA at the University of Oxford and an MFA at UMass-Amherst. She's online here: caroline-crew.com.

Alexander Chee, Judge: "The world turns in Crew's vision, essay by essay, renewed or revealed in ways only she can provide, and all of it brought to us in a voice I'd follow into any topic—propulsive, lyrical, able to turn on a dime, as the expression goes. The result is a guide to the trap doors this culture sets up for women, and the landscape only visible once you fall through. An unforgettable debut."

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