We are delighted to announce that Anne Goldman has won the 2025 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. Her manuscript, House of Fragile Things, will be published in 2027 by the University of New Mexico Press. Goldman will also receive a $1,000 award as part of her prize. All entries were screened by the editors, and our Final Judge, Ander Monson, chose the winner from among the finalists. All of us here at River Teeth, are grateful to the many writers who submitted their manuscripts to the contest and to Ander Monson for sharing his time and expertise to select the winner.
About the winning manuscript, Monson writes:
I love best how Anne Goldman’s House of Fragile Things stitches the past to the present and the world to the mind, or maybe the reverse. When we make ourselves porous, we seep out of ourselves as we allow the world in, and we find the dimensions of the self are vaster than we initially supposed. Medusa jellyfish, flocks of waxwings, being a ghost in Boulder, the death of a brother, Dickinson and Darwin, the sudden shock of living through an earthquake: these are world and self at once, and the play between them is where the electricity of living is. This is a great and risky essay collection, unafraid to embrace ‘deflection over direction, the beauty of peripheral vision,’ and in so doing arrives at an original and thrilling place. This book takes big swings and I am here for it.
Anne Goldman is the author of two essay collections. Stargazing in the Atomic Age (University of Georgia Press, 2021), was named a Best Book of 2021 by Kirkus Reviews and was awarded a silver medal by the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2022. Her second collection, House of Fragile Things, won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize for 2025 and is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in 2027. Currently she is writing a book centered upon the work of the 17th-18th-century flower painter Rachel Ruysch.
Goldman has published three scholarly books. Among them is Take My Word: Autobiographical Innovations of Ethnic American Working Women, which honors unsung women of the twentieth-century who invented new forms of memoir writing to bring their stories into being.
Goldman’s short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, the Guardian, Women’s Studies, the Georgia Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, VOLT, Fourth Genre, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her essays have been cited in several editions of the Best American Essays as well as in the Best American Science and Nature Writing and the Best American Travel Writing.
After living for many years in California, Goldman now makes her home in Massachusetts.
We also want to extend our warmest congratulations to the 2025 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize finalists and semi-finalists.
Winner
Anne Goldman: House of Fragile Things
Runner-up
D.A. Navoti: One Pima Pilgrim: A Symphonic Memoir of a Father, His Son, and the Indigenous Southwest
Finalists (in alphabetical order)
Nahla Beier: Somebody Shot My Apples Today: A Memoir of Palestine
Wes Blake: Hazelgreen and Other Haunts
Doug Crandell: After All This is Over: A Memoir in Pieces
Semifinalists:
Sophie Ezzell: Winged: A Memoir in Constellation
Sarah Giragosian: What Kind of Hawk
Martha-Grace Duncan: Death of a Dreamer
Sonya Huber: Raw Materials
Emily Mathis: Buoyancy: A Body in Space
