The NWP is pleased to announce that writers Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko have won the 2024 Krause Essay Prize for their essay “Not One Tree,” which appeared in n+1.
Glass and Tycko will be honored at the Krause Essay Prize award ceremony on Thursday, February 27 at 7:30pm at the UI Old Capitol Senate Chambers—and you are invited. There they’ll receive the Prize’s $10,000 award and each will receive an inscribed walnut letterbox handcrafted by a local Kalona artisan. A dessert reception and conversation with NWP faculty will follow. Mark your calendars now.

Photo of Sasha Tycko by Peter Habib.
Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist and artist working on a PhD at Emory University. Her research focuses on the Atlanta forest at the center of the conflict over “Cop City,” using a range of media to explore how the contested landscape motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Through this work, she has produced two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work, and a photography exhibition, “Ways of the Atlanta Forest.”
Grace Glass is a writer, reluctantly, because some things must yet be said. (For personal and political reasons, she prefers to remain pseudonymous.)
According to the collaborators: “Grace and Sasha made friends in the Atlanta forest, studied Torah together, and briefly shared an address while writing this essay.”
Made possible by the Kyle J. and Sharon Krause Family Foundation, and run by the NWP, the Krause Essay Prize is awarded annually to the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying. Open to projects in any genre, medium, or form, the Krause Essay Prize stretches the definition of “essaying” in order to celebrate work that is defined by what it does—the activity that it engages in—rather than what it is.
Nominations for the Krause Essay Prize are made each year by a committee of writers, filmmakers, radio producers, visual artists, editors, and readers. The nominated essays then become texts in a graduate writing seminar offered by the NWP in spring, in which graduate students ultimately select the winning work.
In case you missed it, below are this year’s nominees:
2024 Krause Essay Prize nominees
“Trapdoor” by Kathleen Alcott
Dayswork by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
The Land, The Water, The Sky by Black Belt Eagle Scout
“Not One Tree” by Grace Glass & Sasha Tycko
“Field Guide to Falling Ill” by Jonathan Gleason
An Introduction to Exile by Oz Johnson
“Gay is the Thing with Feathers” by Shauna Laurel Jones
Couplets by Maggie Milner
At the Mercy of the Light by Ed Pavlić
“Explanations Are Not Excuses” by Sarah Schulman
Hydra Medusa by Brandon Shimoda
“Everywhere Light” by Jake Skeets

Writer Grace Glass. Photo courtesy of the author.