NWP student Richard Frailing won this year's Roxanne Mueller Award for his essay, "Silver Salt."

Judge Nicolás Medina Mora Pérez, an NWP alum and author of the forthcoming book America Del Norte, wrote:

"An elegant meditation on memory, wave physics, photographic technology, and the irrepressible human desire to take a moment outside of time, fix it in place, and preserve it in some fashion, Richard Frailing's 'Silver Salt' provides us with incontrovertible evidence that whatever it was that people talked about when they talked about 'the lyric essay' is — to our great fortune! — alive and well in the Middle-West. Through scattered projective vignettes of angular prose that calls to mind the sharp edges of Didion's White Album, but also the melancholy ruminations of W.G. Sebald, Frailing juxtaposes considerations of Alzheimer's disease, the tension between analog and digital sorceries, the ambivalence of inheritance and bequests, and the very nature of light. In doing so, he invites us to trace constellations between unfamiliar stars, taking us through unexpected detours that gradually cohere, while nonetheless declining to grant us the satisfaction of a definitive conclusion."