The Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize
The Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize is an annual literary prize given by HerStry. Each year we invite a guest judge to review the entries and select three winners. Our 2025 guest judge was Negesti Kaudo, author of, Ripe: Essays. Negesti read through the final short-listed essays and chose the three which stood out to her for their storytelling, structure, and overall narrative arc.
2025 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize Winners
First Place:
A Screaming Thing
by Jessica Tabak
Negesti’s Comments:
From the first sentence, I was hooked. We enter the essay as a witness to a narrator in so much pain she ends up collapsing on the bathroom floor — not the first time, and not the last. We then follow her unexpected journey of attempting to get a diagnosis (and proper medical care) through multiple doctors visits, encounters with medical professionals denying the reality of her pain, and more. This essay explores the topic of women's pain through one narrator's experience and it tackles the subject beautifully with a combination of raw, vulnerable emotion, anger, and research. I kept thinking about this essay for days after I read it, considering my own experiences of pain and with doctors office, but also ruminating on the pointed way the narrator makes every reader consider how they witness the pain of others. This sentence haunted and stunned me: "My life's worth had become a calculation: the minutes a day my body burns itself alive, multiplied by the hours when I lie terrified of those minutes, divided by whatever else was left."
Second Place:
Secret RECIPES
by Amie McGraham
Negesti’s Comments:
Reading this was such a delight! This piece pays homage to the life of the narrator's mother by existing as both a portrait of their relationship and a love letter to her through recipes and vignettes. The artful combination of text pulled from the narrator's mother's cooking column and cookbook juxtaposed against the different scenes of their life together (and apart) being woven together by recipes was so well done, I did not want to stop reading...and then I wanted to start cooking! As a reader, it felt like a privilege to witness the relationship that's portrayed on the page in all its ebbs and flows throughout. At some points, it feels like a walking essay, exploring different tchotkes in the family home and other times a hermit crab essay written in the style of a cookbook, but at the end of it, like me, the reader will probably want to call their mom or loved one.
Third Place:
Nothing but the Truth
by Suz Guthmann
Negesti’s Comments:
WOW. This essay takes the reader on an unexpected journey after being ghosted by a partner. Typically, I don't like when people say it's "brave" to write about something, but the courage this piece delivers on can be summed up in one of the many amazing images inside it: "Oddly, the cats, who have no idea what is going on, are now twining between the woman’s legs, like some Norse goddess warrior’s faithful companions." Sometimes it can be very difficult for a writer to explore their own trauma on the page, and this is an example of a piece being written at the right time and told in a way that focuses on the narrator's experience without bending to the wishes or expectations of the reader. It also takes a lot of skill to masterfully recreate gaslighting on the page that makes even the reader question the plot of the story. Well done.
