21st Century Essays
Edited by David Lazar and Patrick Madden


New & Forthcoming 21st Century Essays Titles:

Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues cover

Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues

Christine Imperial

Winner of the Gournay Prize

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Engine Running: Essays

Cade Mason

2022

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Ripe: Essays

Negesti Kaudo

2022

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Dark Tourist: Essays

Hasanthika Sirisena

2022

Winner of the Gournay Prize

Don't Look Now book cover

Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen

Edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar

2020

Warhol's Mother's Pantry book cover

Warhol’s Mother’s Pantry: Art, America, and the Mom in Pop

M. I. Devine

2019

Winner of the Gournay Prize

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This One Will Hurt You

Paul Crenshaw

2019

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On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine

Sonya Bilocerkowycz

2019

Winner of the Gournay Prize

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Echo's Fugue

Desirae Matherly

2019

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Fear Icons
Essays

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel

2018

Winner of the Gournay Prize

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Love’s Long Line

Sophfronia Scott

2018

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The Real Life of the Parthenon

Patricia Vigderman

2018

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Curiouser and Curiouser
Essays

Nicholas Delbanco

2017

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You, Me, and the Violence

Catherine Taylor

2017

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A Mother's Tale

Phillip Lopate

2017

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Don't Come Back

Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas

2017


This series from Mad Creek Books is a vehicle to discover, publish, and promote some of the most daring, ingenious, and artistic nonfiction. This is the first and only major series that announces its focus on the essay—a genre whose plasticity, timelessness, popularity, and centrality to nonfiction writing make it especially important in the field of nonfiction literature. In addition to publishing the most interesting and innovative books of essays by American writers, the series publishes extraordinary international essayists and reprint works by neglected or forgotten essayists, voices that deserve to be heard, revived, and reprised. The series is a major addition to the possibilities of contemporary literary nonfiction, focusing on that central, frequently chimerical, and invariably supple form: The Essay.

All submissions should come through Submittable, but for other queries about the series, please email madcreekbooks@osu.edu. Submissions to the series will be accepted annually from March 1st-April 30th, when we also read for the Gournay Prize.

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About the Series Editors

photograh of David Lazar

DavidLazar’sbooks include Celeste Holm Syndrome, Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen (co-edited with Kristen Iversen), I’ll Be Your Mirror: Essays and Aphorisms, Occasional Desire: Essays, Who’s Afraid of Helen of Troy, The Body of Brooklyn, Truth in Nonfiction, Essaying the Essay, Powder Town, AfterMontaigne (co-edited with Patrick Madden), and many more. A frequent Best American Essays honoree, he is Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, where he created the MFA program in nonfiction, having previously created the PhD, MA and undergraduate programs in nonfiction at Ohio University, where he taught from 1990–2006. Lazar is founding editor of the literary magazine Hotel Amerika and was a Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction for 2015-16.

Patrick Madden Photograph

Patrick Madden is the author of three books of essays: Disparates, Sublime Physick, and Quotidiana. He is coeditor (with David Lazar) of After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays and cotranslator (with John Oliver Simon and Steven Stewart) of the Selected Poems of Eduardo Milán. His essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, the Iowa Review, the Normal School, River Teeth, and other journals, as well as in the Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Spiritual Writing. His books have won Independent Publisher, Foreword Indies, and Association of Mormon Letters awards, among others. A two-time Fulbright fellow to Uruguay, he teaches at Brigham Young University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He currently serves as vice president of the NonfictionNOW conference and coeditor of Fourth Genre, and he curates the online anthology and essay resource Quotidiana.

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Editorial Advisory Board

Robert Atwan

Mary Cappello

John D’Agata

Wayne Koestenbaum

Phillip Lopate

Maggie Nelson

Lia Purpura

Claudia Rankine

David Shields