The Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction

Special Guest Judge, Michelle Tea:

I select The Outhouse Keeps the Score by Itto Outini. I appreciated the daring in taking on such a traditionally repugnant subject as our toilets and how we use them, our rituals of defecatory maintenance. In doing so, the author showed us both the common denominator of our shared human-ness, as well as the vast differences in location, culture and resources that make such a collective experience so wildly different. As a person both without sight and with a particular personal history, the author explores the hurdles experienced in doing something so presumably simple as using a bathroom in an American home. The result is revelatory. That they do it with grace, elegance and honesty; without shame and even with glimmers of humor, reveals a literary voice that does not-flaunt its impressive self-awareness but simply allows for it to inform every sentence, creates a narrative voice that, as a reader, I felt incredibly held by, implicitly trusting of. It’s a fantastic, fully-formed creation.

Michelle Tea’s most recent book is Modern Magic: Stories, Rituals and Spells for Contemporary Witches. Her most recent literary intervention is DOPAMINE Books, a queer, non-profit press in collaboration with Semiotext(e). Tea is a recipient of honors and residencies from PEN/America, the Guggenheim Foundation, Loghaven Artist Residency, Yaddo, and others.