The Gournay nonfiction Book Prize for Essays
Ends on
$1000 and publication with Mad Creek Books (an imprint of The Ohio State University Press) will be awarded to one book length collection of essays each year.
Submission window: March 1-April 30. Please note that all manuscripts submitted to the prize will also be considered for general publication in the 21st Century Essays series.
- The award is open to all writers for first books of essays. (Writers may have published books previously in other genres.)
- The award is open to all writers regardless of citizenship.
- Prior publication of your manuscript as a whole in any format (including electronic or self-published) makes it ineligible. Individual essays that have been previously published may be included in the manuscript.
- Simultaneous submission should be noted, and prompt withdrawal if accepted for publication elsewhere is required.
- Authors may submit more than one manuscript to the competition as long as an entry fee is paid for each submission.
- Previously submitted manuscripts are eligible.
Please include as much of the following information as you can when you submit your manuscript materials:
- Title of your manuscript
- General description (1-2 pages) of your project as well as target audience.
- Word count of the project (we publish manuscripts that range from 40,000-85,000 words), along with information about any images you plan to include.
- Bio, resume, or CV
- List of acknowledgments of previously published work (title and magazine/journal/anthology) included in the manuscript.
Previous prize winners include Lynette D'Amico (Men I Hate), Amy Lee Scott (When the World Explodes), Agata Brewer (The Hunger Book), Christine Imperial (Don't Mistake Me for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues, forthcoming 2023), Hasanthika Sirisena (Dark Tourist and Other Essays), M.I. Devine (Warhol's Mother's Pantry: Art, America, and the Mom in Pop), Sonya Bilocerkowycz (On Our War Home From the Revolution), and Kisha Schlegel (Fear Icons).
We make every effort to review submissions within 8 weeks of the close of the submission period. Please send questions to Kristen Elias Rowley at eliasrowley.1@osu.edu. Thank you!
About the Judges:
David Lazar's books include Celeste Holm Syndrome, Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen, I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms, After Montaigne (co-edited with Patrick Madden), and many more. A frequent Best American Essays honoree, Lazar is founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika and was a Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.
Patrick Madden is the author of Disparates, Sublime Physick, and Quotidiana, and coeditor (with David Lazar) of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays. His books have won Independent Publisher, Foreword Indies, and Association of Mormon Letters awards, among others. He currently serves as vice president of the NonfictionNOW conference and coeditor of Fourth Genre.
Kristen Elias Rowley is Editorial Director of OSU Press, where she created and launched their Mad Creek Books imprint in 2017. Books she's edited have won International Latino Book Awards, Lambda awards, numerous state book awards, PEN prizes, the Grub Street Prize, and several have been selected as National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award finalists. She has been acquiring and editing books for 19 years.