Books in the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction series

Set primarily in Mexico and the American Northwest, yet equally at home with Achilleus on the Trojan plains or with Walt Whitman in his New Jersey home, these fifteen essays pass back and forth across international boundaries as easily as they cross the more fluid lines separating past and present.

The recollections and yarns, historical meditations, and reportage brought together in Mountain Blood display a sensibility formed by the harsh, outlandishly beautiful terrain of the American West and the place it occupies in the American psyche.

An exploration of perfection. Study in Perfect winds its way around and through the many permutations of this most hermetic and exalted concept and proceeds with the full consciousness that perfection's exact definition is subjective, reliant on who is speaking, and easily unmoored by time, geography, and the vagaries of taste.

Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen's artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender.

When Aldrich's friend took his own life, they had known each other many years. With this work, Aldrich struggles with her own failure to act on her suspicions about her friend's intentions. Intimate and austere, clear eyed and tender, this innovative work creates a new form in which to experience grief, remembrance, and reconciliation.

In this soul-piercing memoir, David McKain penetrates the secret world of a poor boy coming of age on his own in ""God's Country"", a small oil-drilling town in the Allegheny Mountains during the 1940s and 1950s. Spellbound is an unforgettable story of a family enmeshed in tenderness and poverty, faith and affliction.

Uses a violent incident that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2012 as a springboard for examining the long-term cultural and psychological effects of the Vietnam War. Paisley Rekdal draws on a range of material and fashions it into a compelling account of the dislocations suffered by the Vietnamese and by American-born veterans.

This work blends poetry with narrative, ethnography with autobiography, and philosophy with literature. It begins and ends with meditations on place, the first an excavation of the underground depths of New York City and the conclusion a travelogue of Italy.

This is Jill Christman's account of her first 30 years. Her story runs the gamut of dramatic life events, including childhood sexual abuse, accidental death and psychological trauma, but her memoir is more than a litany of horrors: it is an open-eyed, wide-hearted look at a life worth surviving.

Gives a portrait of the resilience and richness of the natural world in Philadelphia and of the ways that gardening can connect nature to urban space. This book explores the city as a part of its ecosystem and animates the lives of individual gardeners and naturalists working in the area around her home.