by Natasia Verdel

We are delighted to announce Ander Monson as the final judge for the 2025 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize.

Ander Monson is the author of nine books, the latest being Predator: A Memoir, A Movie, An Obsession, published by Graywolf Press in 2022. Monson’s other works and projects branch across nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. He is a professor at the University of Arizona and the editor of the journal DIAGRAM, New Michigan Press, Essay Daily, and March Xness. Monson has received the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award in Nonfiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Visit his author site here.  

 Here is Ander Monson in conversation with Assistant Managing Editor, Natasia Verdel. 

NV: What connection do you have to River Teeth and what made you want to take on the responsibility of being the 2025 book prize judge?    

AM: Jill asked me and I said yes is the short answer, so the why might be a better question for her. I’m a long time reader of River Teeth and respect the work of the magazine, in both the old iteration and especially in the new one at Ball State. I also like the work of Hannah Hindley, the most recent winner (she was one of my students some years ago and I’m thrilled to see where that work has taken her in her new prize-winning book; I’m glad I wasn’t judging last year because I couldn’t/wouldn’t have picked my own former student). Big New York presses publish so few truly interesting books;  prizes and small presses are where the real action is, at least for the nonfiction that really gets me going, and I’m happy to be part of the good work you’re doing. I look forward to seeing what beautiful book manuscripts there are and finding what I hope is the most entrancing one. 

NV: What is the most challenging or most enjoyable parts of writing nonfiction books for you? What do you hope to gain or see from your work or others?    

AM: The thing I love most about nonfiction is how the self reveals–maybe even creates–itself by engagement with some aspect of the world. I often don’t know what I feel about something until I write about it, and writing about stuff, even dumb adolescent (seeming) stuff like video games or music or beauty or Predator, gives the self something to chew on. When we write about our obsessions we open up doors inside of us, and the work of nonfiction is to go through those doors and see what’s on the other side–in us and in the world.  

NV: Is there a River Teeth issue, review, or essay that is most prominent for you? 

AM: I was just reading a Melody Glenn essay from River Teeth 25.2, adjacent to her new book, Mother of Methadone: a Doctor’s Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis. I’m starting up a new project this fall called Tucson Essay Club <tucsonessayclub.org> because a big strand of the contemporary essay (or just cnf in general) runs through Tucson. All kinds of strange roads lead here; I live in one of those cities that just has a mythology to it, partly earned partly not, and it’s a very writerly town. Melody is a doctor and writer in Tucson and her new book is excellent, equal thirds memoir, essay, and research, all around some of the very same questions that show up in this shorter form in “Naloxone, Syringes, and Pipes.” Plus it takes place in Tucson, so it’s on my mind. What I want Tucson Essay Club to, first, celebrate, and then to hopefully figure out is what it is about Tucson that draws so many writers to it, either passing through or living here. I know it’s the MFA program in part, but so many more writers come through outside of the university and have remarkable experiences here or live here for a while, or forever. Or maybe it’s just a place that people want to write about because it’s so unusual. I’m not sure; maybe this essay from River Teeth will help. 

NV: Do you read differently when you are judging a book rather than reading one for pleasure? 

AM: Oh for sure, though a book’s ability to get me to read it for pleasure is a big part of what a book has to do to get my vote. If it feels too much like work it’s not that good of a book. So much of my life is spent either reading students’ work (as a teacher, which is a specific kind of reading) or reading as an editor (I edit a lot of literary projects, and that too is another specific kind of reading) or even reading for my own writing (a third kind of reading) that reading just for pleasure feels almost like a radical act. A book needs to give pleasure to work–though pleasure in this context encapsulates a lot of different things, not all of which we might choose to seek out on our own. But it needs to do more than that too. It needs to be a book, a work of art, not just a collection of stuff. I’m partial to books that have feel thought-through, like the individual parts (if they’re perceptible, like in an essay collection they usually are but in a memoir they may be less so) cohere into a larger whole. By the time I’m done I want to be able to feel the mind of the writer shaping the architecture of the book and to see the relationships of the parts to the bigger picture. I don’t always need that in my pleasure reading (that’s probably a lie: I bet I do; I just don’t have to think about and analyze these relationships when I read for pleasure), but I definitely do when I’m reading to figure out what project most deserves publication. 

NV: What is your approach to judging books? Do you have a specific process going into judging and how do you separate your personal interests?   

AM: Why separate my personal interests? My personal interests are wide-ranging and make me who I am as a reader and a writer and an editor and a person. I love my personal interests, and I love yours. I’m as idiosyncratic as any judge, actually maybe a little bit more, because I’ve learned to lean into my idiosyncrasies as a reader and writer and person. We can’t not, for starters, so why don’t we just say yes to the dress? I want books that lean into their own idiosyncrasies. I don’t want an objective I. There’s no such thing in creative nonfiction or any nonfiction for that matter. I don’t want to read what or how everybody else thinks. I want to read what and how you think and why this is the book you wrote. I want subjective selves in books, the more subjective the better. I want books that are by weirdos, that are weird and know they’re weird and roll with it. We live in the age of so-called AI which is really just a kind of algorithmic magic trick overlaying huge swaths of data that produce things that are middle-of-the-road with no sharp edges. Nobody wants that, and I don’t think anyone wants a judge who pretends to be purely objective, only selecting a book that is definitively The Best. No such thing! Now that doesn’t mean that I’m more likely to select a book that is close to my own writing or reading interests, either. I’m probably even more selective about the things I’m really interested in, like the Mass Effect video game series: you really need to do it if you’re going to do that. But a good book, a notable book, a book that loves itself, will assert its own subjectivity, and sing it so we can all follow the song. 

NV: What are your motivations and inspirations as both a reader and writer?  

AM: Hard to answer this big of a question simply. I guess I want to be entranced by a writer, by an essay, by a subject. I want to follow an obsession as deep as it can go and see what else is there. I want to be changed by it. I want to allow myself to be changed by it, even if that change doesn’t end up happening. I want to be open to things. I want to take them into me, or see them taken into someone else, to see myself or that other I changed by them. If we don’t want to be changed what is it we are even doing? 

NV: Do you have any advice for anyone interested in literary nonfiction, what lessons or experiences have you had that impacted your outlook and methods of reading and writing within nonfiction? 

AM: What I’ve learned about reading and writing nonfiction is that the self is primary and inexhaustible, but it is only apprehensible when it comes in encounter with other phenomena: other people, books, games, music, autobiography, terror, beauty, the strangeness and infinite detail of the world. It took me a long time to learn that you didn’t really need to know stuff to write nonfiction. You just needed to be curious and driven and willing to look. I’ve been lucky enough to be in this game for a while now, and I’ve become more willing to trust my personal sense that there’s something here when I can feel it bubbling up. I trust the process and the process is obsession and encounter. You can’t just stay inside writing nonfiction either: that encounter, that investigation, that going out there is super important because that’s how we find stuff out and change our minds. That’s how we narratize research. That’s how an essay or a book of essays or a book-long essay or a memoir or whatever becomes an adventure, which is what we most want from what we read. By we I mean I but I hope I also mean we.