The NWP is pleased to announce that Sarah Aziza has won the 2025 Krause Essay Prize for the essay “The Work of the Witness.” Aziza’s winning essay originally appeared in the January 2024 issue of Jewish Currents.
The runner up for this year’s prize was Recognizing the Stranger, a book-length essay by Isabella Hammad, with honorable mentions going to the essay “From Witness, from Speech, from Image” by Summer Farah, and the film “The People’s Joker,” directed by Vera Drew.
Sarah Aziza will be honored at the Krause Essay Prize award ceremony this spring 2026 (date/time TBA) at the UI Old Capitol Senate Chambers—and you are invited. There Sarah will receive the Prize’s $10,000 award and will receive an inscribed walnut letterbox handcrafted by a local Kalona artisan. A dessert reception and conversation with NWP faculty will follow.
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Her journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, Lux Magazine, The Intercept, and The Nation, and her forthcoming book of hybrid nonfiction will be published in 2025.
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.
Below are the 2025 Krause Essay Prize nominees:
- Clair Wills’s Missing Persons
- Amelia Barros’s “The Anointing”
- Joyelle McSweeney’s “Style as Survival”
- Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger
- Daniel Saldañas París’s Planes Flying Over a Monster
- "The Work of the Witness" by Sarah Aziza
- Summer Farah’s “From Witness From Speech From Image”
- “All My Life I Had to Tear So Crazy” an interview with Juliana Huxtable and Zora Jade Khiry
- “Gutbucket” by Emily Raboteau
- Artificial: A Love Story by Amy Kurzweil
- Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby
- The People’s Joker directed by Vera Drew