The Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize is an annual literary prize given by HerStry. Each year, HerStry invites a guest judge to review the entries and select three winners. The 2024 guest judge was Kelly McMasters, author of, The Leaving Season and Welcome to Shirley. Kelly read through the final short-listed essays and chose the three that stood out to her for their storytelling, structure, and overall narrative arc.

FIRST PLACE:
THE ALCHEMIST’S MESSENGER

by Annie Marhefka

Kelly’s Comments:
”We enter this essay by way of a friendly summer scene in Baltimore, one whose simplicity belies the intricate power of what’s to come. Indeed, the city of Baltimore is a character all on its own here, with its cobblestones and dive bars, row homes and the harbor, building on the idea of home that is so present in this piece. The idea of escape is also layered in early; not from a place, necessarily, but from something more ineffable, and much of the essay shows the imperfect ways we humans try to shield ourselves from loss, shore ourselves up against the waves that inevitably break against us, over and over.

The sudden appearance of an old friend shifts the narrator’s carefully constructed equilibrium: “Despite the beard and the hat and the dark and the swarm of people weaving between us, I felt myself lift at the sight of him.” What I love most about this story is that it goes in a direction I never could have guessed. In lush, languid prose, this writer marshals tragedies alongside magic, creating her own kind of alchemy to build a new definition of family. Hope is central here, and courageous, and the piece ultimately reminds us that sometimes it takes the anchor of an old friend—and the way they see us—to set us back on the right course. “

Read the full essay here.