The Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction

Special Guest Judge, Stacey Waite:

“The Question I Couldn’t Ask” is both a deeply personal and profoundly political essay about an intricate web of subject matters–pregnancy, capitalist medicine, sexism, and the complex terrain of embodiment inside the institutional bounds of a red state. The narrative carries the reader through the emotional landscape of embodied fear. The author writes, “Every time I shifted, the paper beneath me crackled, loud and insistent, as if reminding me that my body belonged to the process now.” Indeed, the essay raises the unsettling and urgent question: to whom do our bodies belong? The essay takes on this question with stark clarity and relentless reflective grace. When you read this piece, you walk away knowing you have come into contact with something terrifying and true; you see, with a tender focus, the fragility and power of embodied experience.

Stacey Waite is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English and Graduate Chair at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln and is the author of five collections of poetry: Choke (winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize for Poetry), Love Poem to Androgyny, the lake has no saint (Winner of the Snowbound Prize for Poetry), Butch Geography (2013), and the Lambda-nomimated collection A Real Man Would Have A Gun (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). Waite is also the author of Teaching Queer: Radical Possibilities for Writing and Knowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Working in both creative writing and composition studies, Waite is also co-editor of Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies and the textbook, Ways of Reading. Waite’s poetry and essays have appeared in such journals as Writing on the Edge, Assay, New Territory, Literacy in Composition Studies, and Black Warrior Review. Waite’s poems have been anthologized in a range of collections including Best American Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Literature. Visit Waite’s website at www.staceywaite.com.