Announcing the 2025 Memoir Prize Winners!
And the winners are...Click to explore the full list of 1 Grand Prize, 2 Finalists. 22 Category Winners, and 20 Honorable Mentions. Congratulations to all our winners!
The Grand Prize Winner of the 2025 Memoir Prize for Books is
Firstborn Girls by Bernice L. McFadden
Published by Penguin Random House
From award-winning author and creative writing professor at Tulane University comes an intimate and powerful memoir exploring inherited trauma, family secrets, and the enduring bonds of love between mothers and daughters. On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.
The Two Finalists for 2025 are:
Finalist & Winner in the Categories of Social Justice, Healing, and Investigative Research:
They Call You Back: A Lost History, A Search, A Memoir by Tim Z. Hernandez
The University of Arizona Press
Hernandez continues his search for the twenty-eight Mexican farm labor deportees who were killed in the 1948 plane wreck at Los Gatos Canyon while also turning the lens on himself and his ancestral past, revealing the tumultuous and deeply intimate experiences that have fueled his investigations—a lifelong journey haunted by memory, addiction, generational trauma, and the spirit world.
Finalist & Winner in the Categories of Identity, Environment, and LGBTQ+:
Good Soil by Jeff Chu
A profound meditation on nature, heritage, and belonging, from an accomplished journalist who left New York City for life on a working farm. Good Soil helps readers connect to the land and to one another at a time when we seem drawn most to the phones in our hands. For nature lovers, foodies, and anyone who has daydreamed about a more fulfilling life, this book is a tribute to friendship, to the sacredness of our bond with the natural world, and to how love can grow from the unlikeliest of places.
Category Winners:
Category: FOOD
Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
Chantha Nguon
An inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee’s connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.
Categories: LGBTQ+, Family, Resilience
Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found
Nikkya Hargrove
Spent a good portion of her childhood in prison visiting rooms. When her mother—addicted to cocaine and just out of prison—had a son and then died only a few months later. Although she had just graduated from college, she decided to fight for custody of her half-brother, Jonathan.
Category Winner: Literary Prose
Revisiting the Mines: Essays and Excavations
A collection of essays reflecting on the past and the lessons and refractions for the present moment. “A love letter to the transportive power of memory, incandescent with hard-earned truths and undeniable prose.”
Categories: Family, Immigrants, American Dream
The Manicurist’s Daughter: A Memoir
Susan Lieu
An emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream, a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery.
Categories Won: LGBTQ+, Identity, Self-Realization
Frighten the Horses
Oliver Radclyffe
A trans man’s brave and personal story of self-realization, about a housewife and mother who renegotiates an utterly conventional life that simply doesn’t fit, first to come out as lesbian, then to face the question of his gender identity, and ultimately to become the man he is supposed to be.
Categories: History and Culture
A China Story: Growing Up in Mao’s Cultural Revolution
Opening Line Publishing
A first-hand account of Mao’s deadly Cultural Revolution and shares her emotional journey of uncovering the truth of the murder of her father, a renowned nuclear weapons expert, by the Chinese military during that period.
Category Winner: Reconciliation
My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir
Adam Gussow
An inspiring memoir about the author’s lifelong quest for racial reconciliation, the love that sustains his interracial family in contemporary Mississippi, and the “Yes we can!” hope for American renewal that fades after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the despair-driven rise of Black Lives Matter.
Category: Healing
Cold in Mississippi: A Memoir of Doctoring, Make Do, and Meaning
An Unpublished Manuscript
A gay physician explores how fear and the power of science erased the human soul from medicine—and how grief and love led him to reclaim its meaning. Framed by his experiences of growing up in 1960s Mississippi, the author navigates the spiritual costs of caregiving, the private toll of parental loss, and the mystery of how we heal.
Category Winner: Religion
We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion
Melody S. Gee
In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion’s grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises.
Category: Culture
Beloved Strangers
Maria Chaudhuri
Chaudhuri reflects on her experiences as a girl child, a foreign student in the U.S. and later, a young woman, navigating the complexities of home, culture, and the ties that bind as well as release us - from family and friends.
Category Winner: Cultural Identity, African Diaspora
Bush Meat, Polygamy, and Coup D’etats
An Unpublished Manuscript
A compilation of lyric essays that chronicle her experiences residing in Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa while working as the Peace Corps’ regional medical director. A national identity crisis in Cote D’Ivoire sparks several military coup d’états and mirrors her own identity exploration as an African American emigree in Africa. Her marriage implodes when she discovers her African-born, American husband is a polygamist, and she learns that skin color alone does not bind one to a continent.
Categories: Memory, Representation, Survival, LGBTQ+, and Queer Identity
What We Remember, What We Forget
Siobhan Harvey
An Unpublished Manuscript
A testament to how, in memory, representation and survival, we endure, evolve, challenge others’ expectations, and overcome personal adversity.
Categories: Racial Reckoning, Identity, Culture
Just Another Native Son
Stone Mims
An Unpublished Manuscript
hybrid work containing, speculative nonfiction, personal essay, journalism, and interviews, Just Another Native Son is a fiery rebuttal to the American post racial myth.
Categories: Identity, Adoption, LGBTQ+ Culture, Race, Reinvention,
Somewhere Else
Dan Cho
An Unpublished Manuscript
A deeply personal and unflinchingly honest memoir about longing, identity, and the search for home. Growing up as one of the only Korean kids in a small Washington town, Dan always felt like he existed on the fringes—never quite invisible, but never fully seen. Under the weight of his father’s relentless expectations and the quiet ache of a life that didn’t quite fit, he dreamed of escape, of reinvention, of somewhere else.
Categories: Recovery, Spirituality, Religion, Trauma
You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir
Dr. Jamie Marich
explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing that tells you: no matter which path you choose—no matter what you know in your heart to be true—you’re probably damned.
Category: Travel
Writer’s Postcards
Dipika Mukherjee
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part commentary, Writer’s Postcards is a collection of essays that examine imagination and culture through the lens of geography.
Category: LGBTQ+ Identity
Encounters With Men
Bob Ostertag
Nomadic Press/Black Lawrence Press
Bob Ostertag writes of the men he has known in stories shot through with deep love and deep violence, sex often at the core. Here, we encounter the worst of the AIDS epidemic and the best of human behavior.
Category: Mothers & Daughters
May It Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers
Minelle Mahtani
Minelle Mahtani had taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she’d moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.
Categories: Refugee, Adversity, Coming of Age
The Mango Chronicle
Ricardo Jose Gonzalez-Rothi
This is a bittersweet, coming-of-age story about a kid whose Cuban Huck—Finn-childhood is upended by a nuclear crisis, lands him in a place where he feels unwelcome, then he becomes a “Good American” by living in two souls, later seeking his roots by remembering the branches of the mango tree that framed his childhood.
Category: Craft
Imagine a Door: A Writer’s Guide to Unlocking Your Story, Choosing a Publishing Path, and Honoring the Creative Journey
Laura Stanfill
A writer’s guide that offers a more equitable and empowering prize: information delivered with gentleness.
Honorable Mentions:
Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru
Barbara Drake-Vera
Candid, poignant, and deeply researched, Melted Away is the true story of how a writer at midlife reclaims her agency, and an ardent plea to care for the planet by embracing collectivism and mutual aid.
Model Home
Michelle Polizzi
offers an intimate portrait of the housing crisis in rural Appalachia. Through the first-person perspective of the protagonist, who loses her home to foreclosure at seventeen, readers are challenged to rethink stereotypes of homelessness and poverty in America.
The Belle of Belfast
Anne Marie Foster
Escape from The Troubles in 1970’s & It’s also a remarkable true love story spanning 50 yrs and several continents
No One Crosses the Wolf: a memoir
Lisa Nikolidakis
A powerful memoir about the traumas of a perilous childhood, a shattering murder-suicide, and a healing journey from escape to survival to recovery.
Fi
Alexandra Fuller
a career-defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child.
The Fine Art of Grieving
Jane Edberg
This lyrical, original, beautifully written story is about how, after the tragic death of her adored nineteen-year-old son, she rediscovers the power of art to create an unconventional pathway through grief.
Speak Her Name
Mary Jumbelic
a memoir of pain and triumph. For 25 years, Dr. Mary Jumbelic has encounted female bodies violated, battered, and stabbed.These stories are of the women she has met and the woman she became. They are a source of education, safety, and awareness for everyone.
Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage
Kelly Foster Lundquist
The straight woman who unwittingly marries a gay man is either a laughingstock or a fool—or both—in the popular imagination. reckons honestly with the harm done to both husband and wife by churches that required rigid performances of gender and sexuality.
A Song for Olaf: A Memoir of Sibling Love at the Dawn of the HIV-AIDS Pandemic
Jennifer Boulanger
In this expansive memoir steeped in historicity, author Jennifer Boulanger gifts readers with a moving story about truth and lies, societal upheaval and families in crises, as seen through the lens of a loving sister and insightful chronicler.
Unsexed: Memoirs of a Prostitute’s Daughter
Marina DelVecchio
examines the role that sex plays in the life of one woman with two mothers who introduce her to polarized frameworks of female sexuality.
The Angle of Flickering Light
Gina Troisi
She found solace in restlessness—drinking hallucinogenic mushroom tea and inhaling crushed pills and powders—perching herself on the periphery of danger again and again. Gina finally glimpsed a better life for herself when her grandfather, a man who was a surrogate father to her, became terminally ill. She fell in love with John, a stranger who was utterly familiar, but who was addicted to heroin.
INDELIBLE: A MEMOIR
Deanne Ames
The story of the death of a parent, followed by sexual abuse and emotional neglect, betrayal, and denial; but it’s also a story of how the bonds of love and loyalty among siblings can serve as a guiding light down the path to adulthood, offering comfort and hope when all seems lost.
You’re Too Young to Understand
Liz Fiedorow Sjaastad
Shedding light on the complexities of parental mental health and generational trauma, Liz shares the story of a life led despite the fears of “becoming her parents,” and how she showed up for her parents - and herself - when it was needed most.
I Could Name God in Twelve Ways: Essays
Karen Salyer McElmurray
At turns lyrical, poignant, and alluring, McElmurray probes her personal history from the stance of different places, perspectives, and vulnerabilities as she tenderly and fiercely searches for acceptance and a place to call home.
Wire Monkeys
Aundria Adams
Nineteen years old and desperate to heal the wounds of an abusive childhood, I was referred to a Jersey City psychologist. Unbeknownst to me, he was a fraudulent con man who, for the next six years, groomed me to surrender familiar relationships for acceptance into his elite cult of patients.
Up From Ashes: The Streets, Prison, and Redemption
Lardell L. Spratt
The life of a young man born into a dysfunctional, single-parent household within the inner city of Detroit. His story is one of resilience in the face of childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, and pain. He eventually found himself on a dark path that led him into “street life.” where he ended up serving nearly two decades of incarceration within the Michigan Department of Corrections.
Your Story Starts Here: A Year on the Brink with Generation Z
Jim Zervanos
An intimate exploration of the challenges, resilience, and unwavering hope of today’s youth in a turbulent world.
Guns Under the Bed; Memories of a Young Revolutionary
Jody A. Forrester
This memoir tells universal truths about seeking a sense of belonging not found in her family with themes of shame, pride, secrecy, self-valuation, and self-acceptance explored in the context of the culture and politics of that volatile period in American history.
Safe Handling
Rebecca Evans
A collection-length poem that weaves family and heartbreak as Rebecca Evans and her disabled son navigate the challenging medical industry, seeking out-of-state heart surgery. Evans, a single mother to three, must leave her other children behind, wrestling motherhood guilt with mother bear fierceness.
We would like to thank everyone who participated and made the contest possible. The 2026 Memoir Prize is now open for submissions. You are welcome to resubmit if your entry did not win this year. A completely independent publication, MemirMagazine is not funded by university endowment or corporate funding. Proceeds from readers and The Memoir Prize funds the magazine’s mission to provide memoir literature free to the public all year.
I got an Honorable Mention! Hey, it's a start!
So amazing seeing Laura Stanfill here! So excited to check out these books!!