21st Century Essays
Edited by David Lazar and Patrick Madden
New & Forthcoming 21st Century Essays Titles:
Ripe: Essays
Negesti Kaudo
Dark Tourist: Essays
Hasanthika Sirisena
Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day
Sonya Huber

The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here
Susanne Paola Antonetta

Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen
Edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar

How to Make a Slave and Other Essays
Jerald Walker

On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine
Sonya Bilocerkowycz
2019
Winner of the 2018 Gournay Prize
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 madcreek@osupress.org. Submissions to the series will be accepted annually from March 1-April 15, when we also read for the Gournay Prize.
SUBMITTING TO THE GOURNAY PRIZE
Each year, The Gournay Prize awards $1000 and publication in the 21st Century Essays series to a first book of essays. Writers may have published books previously in other genres.
Submission window: March 1—April 15
THE GOURNAY PRIZE WINNERS
2021 Christine Imperial, for her hybrid manuscript interrogating her dual Filipino/US citizenship and identity(forthcoming Spring 2023)
Runner up: Cade Mason, for Engine Running: Essays (forthcoming Fall 2022)
Honorable Mentions:Sarah Cadorette, Paula Harris, Arra Ross, Stephanie Sauer, Lucy Schiller, Phillip Weinstein
2020 Hasanthika Sirisena for Dark Tourist: Essays
Runner up: Genese Grill for Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter
2019 M. I. Devine for Warhol’s Mother’s Pantry: Art, America, and the Mom in Pop
2018 Sonya Bilocerkowycz for On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine
Runner up: Sibbie O’Sullivan for My Private Lennon: Explorations from a Fan who Never Screamed
2017 Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel for Fear Icons
Runner up: Paul Crenshaw for This One Will Hurt You
About the Series Editors

David Lazar’s books 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, After Montaigne (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 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.
Editorial Advisory Board
Robert Atwan
Mary Cappello
John D’Agata
Wayne Koestenbaum
Phillip Lopate
Maggie Nelson
Lia Purpura
Claudia Rankine
David Shields