Winner of the 2024 AHP Nonfiction Prize
Autumn House is pleased to announce that Bigger: A Collection of Essays by Ren Cedar Fuller was selected by Clifford Thompson as the winner of our 2024 Nonfiction Prize. We’re so pleased to publish this debut collection in October 2025.
The pieces in Bigger accomplish what personal essays do at their best: they suggest a new way of looking at things. Whether the subject is an emotionally distant father, a transgender child, a rare disease, or a fondly remembered summer in youth, Ren Cedar Fuller’s voice is wise, compassionate, self-aware, and searching. Bigger offers the deep pleasure of experiences thoughtfully considered, emotions examined, and ideas explored yet still left to us to ponder. This collection is a gem.
—Clifford Thompson, 2024 Nonfiction Prize Judge
Ren Cedar Fuller won Under the Sun’s Summer Writing Contest, was a finalist in the Terry Tempest Williams Prize for Creative Nonfiction and the Iron Horse Prize for a first book of collected prose, and placed second in the Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize. Her essays have appeared in HerStry, Hippocampus, New England Review, North American Review, and Under the Sun, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays.
Ren taught public school in California, Oregon, and Washington before founding a nonprofit early learning center near Seattle. She continues teaching parent education and facilitates parent meetings at TransFamilies, an online support hub for families with gender-diverse children. Her teaching and writing connect through her commitment to celebrating people’s differences. She now lives in Seattle with her husband Jason, who said her writing is “like Indiana Jones, but in a pink bikini.”
We’d also like to congratulate the runner-up, finalists, and semi-finalists for their beautiful words and thank everyone who submitted and trusted us with their manuscripts.
Thanks also to the judge, Cliff, for all his hard work.
RUNNER-UP
Fairyboy: Notes on Growing Up Queer in Rural North Idaho by Keegan Lawler
FINALISTS
Those Little Anodynes by Robin Clarke
Figure Studies by Asha Dore
An Altar in My Heart by Magin LaSov Gregg
Hungry Ghost by Sarah Herrington
Wasp & Orchid by Emily Jalloul
SEMIFINALISTS
Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays by Danielle Bainbridge
Men I Hate by Lynette D’Amico
Mammal by Jason Hardung
Hysterical Light by Jamie Passaro
Synanthropes by Ania Payne
Eyes in the Soles of My Feet by Caroline Sutton
