Winner of the 2026 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize
Autumn House is excited to announce the winner of our 2026 Nonfiction Prize: This Middle Living by Jessie Petrow-Cohen, selected by Ira Sukrungruang! The book will be published in Fall 2027.
Jessie Petrow-Cohen is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Brevity, Waxwing, The Common, and elsewhere. She was selected as the winner of The Kenyon Review‘s Short Nonfiction Contest by Melissa Febos and as the winner of The Indiana Review‘s 1/2K Prize by Brian Turner. She is the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship at The Kenyon Review and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is also a Director of Strategy at The New York Times and an incoming Writer in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University.
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, Ira, for all his hard work.
Runners-Up
The Last Chance Motel by Kathryn Hunt
Fairyboy: Notes on Growing Up Queer in Rural North Idaho by Keegan Lawlor
Finalists
Of Paternal Bondage by Andrea Dooley
Homecomer: A Memoir in Essays by Emma Sharon Kaiser
Diasporican: A Memoir of Dislocations by Zulma Ortiz-Fuentes
Semi-Finalists
I Favor My Daddy: A Tale of Two Sissies by Jamie Brickhouse
Murdery by Jared Hanks
Long Love by Beth Kephart
The Dead I’ve Known by Denise Napoli Long
Buoyancy: A Body in Space by Emily Mathis
Atomic: A Gen X Memoir of Fractured Family and Altered States by Robin Pickering
After Life: Ecologies by Michael Sheehan
At Sea by Gina Tomaine
Echoes of My Father by Thi Ngoc Tran
