Winner of the 2025 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize
Autumn House is excited to announce the winner of our 2025 Noniction Prize: I Am Mostly Bad Blood by Starr Davis, selected by May-lee Chai! This book will be published in October 2026.
Starr Davis is a writer and mother whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review and Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets. She serves as creative nonfiction editor at TriQuarterly and is a 2025 Visions After Violence Fellow. Her reporting has been recognized by Longreads and featured on podcasts including What You Didn’t Expect in Fertility and Truth to Power. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Starr holds an MFA from The City College of New York.
For more info, visit her website here.
We’d also like to congratulate the runner-up, finalists, and semi-finalists for their incredible manuscripts and thank everyone who submitted and trusted us with their manuscripts.
Thanks also to the judge, May-lee, for all her hard work.
RUNNER-UP
She Was Wild Grass by Katie Bennett
FINALISTS
Disfigure Studies by Asha Dore
What Kind of Hawk by Sarah Giragosian
Dispatches from the Ridge: A Memoir in Essays by L.I. Henley*
Fairyboy: Notes on Growing Up Queer in Rural America by Keegan Lawler
SEMIFINALISTS
Hazelgreen and Other Haunts by Wes Blake
A Love That Moves Through Time by Jennifer Bullis
/Cuts by Ana Caballero
Now That You’re Dead, I’ll Tell You Everything by Elizabeth Gray
Dispatches Decades Later by Gail Hosking
River Songs: Reflections on Memphis, Memory & Healing by Meg Jerit
Kindred & Shard by Laurie Kutchins
The Woodcutter’s Daughter: Portraits & Resurrections by Sonja Livingston
Staring into the Sun by Madelyn Postman
Memory’s Disavowed Daughter by Anastasia Walker
*indicates a manuscript that was withdrawn before the winner was selected
