Winners of the 2025 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction

We are pleased to announce that Robin Hemley has selected a winner, a runner-up and three honorable mentions from a slate of finalists. See the full list below. All entrants will receive a copy of the Fall 2025 issue of North American Review in which the winner will appear. A big thank you to everyone who submitted an essay for the prize. We had 353 entries, and it was a pleasure to read such an abundance of fine nonfiction. 

WINNER
Nancy Geyer, “Playgrounds & Kurosawas Ikiru” 

RUNNER-UP
Angie Romines, “Iron Byron”

HONORABLE MENTIONS
Kassie Rene, “My Super is Just Like Every Man in My Life”
Nancy Geyer, “Each Breath: Remembrances”
Joanne Godley, “Dont We All Breathe the Same Air?”

FINALISTS    
Jacob Hibbard, “Untrounceable”
Jaime Lam, “Select One”
Leslie Larson, “The Landlady”
Adrian Potter, “In the Anxiety House”
Ro White, “Choose Your Own Adventure”

SEMI-FINALISTS  
Leah Asmelash, “How to Take a Picture” 
Allie Dixon, “Tomorrow, Tomorrow”
Sriya Dommaraju, “Echoes of Home” 
Bryce Emley, “Know Me by the Shape of My Leaving” 
April Gifford, “Naïveté, or A Gift of Flowers to Perhaps the Wrong Recipient” 
Herb Harris, “Naming the Colors”
Re'Lynn Hansen, "The Poetry Reading on the New Back Porch"
Siew Hii, “Griever, Teacher, Goodbye” 
Zan Kershaw, “Mad Are We” 
Theresa Lin, “Operation Fiction Writer”
Emily Mathis, "The Weight of Water"
Keya Mitra, "The Third Eye, or How I Learned to Move"
Keya Mitra, “Surrender”
Yelizaveta Renfro, "The Bone Seekers"
Tyler Stallings, “Breathing Fire: Smoke Memory, and the Boundaries We Burn”
Cynthia Waldman, “Of Entropy, Spiral Jetty, and The Great Salt Lake”

Robin Hemley photo

Robin Hemley has published sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His most recent books are the autofiction, Oblivion, An After-Autobiography (Gold Wake, 2022), The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, co-authored with Xu Xi (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood (Nebraska, 2020, Penguin SE Asia, 2021).  His new collection of essays is How to Change History: A Salvage Project  (Nebraska, March, 2025). His work has been published and translated widely and he has received such awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, three Pushcart Prizes in both nonfiction and fiction, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction, The Independent Press Book Award for Memoir, among others. He is the Founder of the international nonfiction conference, NonfictioNOW and was the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa for nine years, inaugural director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore, and is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is co-editor with Leila Philip of Speculative Nonfiction. He has delivered readings, workshops, and lectures around the world and is a Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa. The Digital Storytelling Lab at The University of Iowa was recently dedicated in his honor.