The 2017 Profane Nonfiction Prize
The winner of our $1,000 Nonfiction Prize is Trace Ramsey, for his essay "Maltby Road."
Judge Elena Passarello writes:
Stylish in its prose and skilled in its storytelling, this essay stood out in a crowd of great finalists thanks to its frank voice and its many essayistic pivots. As I read it, I felt myself riding right alongside the author through several shifts in time and place and across quite a few emotional landscapes. What a gripping read and what an intelligent, searching authorial voice. I hope I’ll get to read more by this writer very soon.
Our other finalists were:
Jason Arment - "Suffer the Children"
Cheryl Graham - "Degrees of Latitude"
Alexandra O'Sullivan - "Reaching for the Centre"
Marya Hornbacher - "Drifters (Interstate-35)"
Judge Elena Passarello writes:
Stylish in its prose and skilled in its storytelling, this essay stood out in a crowd of great finalists thanks to its frank voice and its many essayistic pivots. As I read it, I felt myself riding right alongside the author through several shifts in time and place and across quite a few emotional landscapes. What a gripping read and what an intelligent, searching authorial voice. I hope I’ll get to read more by this writer very soon.
Our other finalists were:
Jason Arment - "Suffer the Children"
Cheryl Graham - "Degrees of Latitude"
Alexandra O'Sullivan - "Reaching for the Centre"
Marya Hornbacher - "Drifters (Interstate-35)"
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Trace Ramsey is a recipient of the 2017-2018 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship Award in Prose, the 2016 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review, and the 2015 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Award in Literature. Trace’s recent publications include essays in At Length Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, concīs, North Carolina Literary Review, and I Don’t Know How to Help You, a compilation zine from Pioneers Press. In 2014, Trace’s first book—an anthology of his zine Quitter (Quitter: Good Luck Not Dying)—was published by Pioneers Press. This was followed in 2017 by All I Want to Do is Live, also from Pioneers Press. Trace is currently writing a memoir-in-essays, Carrying Capacity, and a novel, The Ornithologists. Trace lives in Durham, NC with his partner and two children.
www.traceramsey.com |