“Not One Tree”

The University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program is pleased to announce that writers Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko have won the 2024 Krause Essay Prize for their essay “Not One Tree,” which appeared in n+1.

Grace Glass is a writer, reluctantly, because some things must yet be said. She has been a cook, a clerk, a communist, a petty thief, and a substitute teacher—and, in an attempt to stay unemployed forever, is experimenting with graduate school. For personal and political reasons, she prefers to remain pseudonymous. She hopes one day to run out of language and become a mime.

Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist and artist working on a PhD at Emory University. Her research focuses on the Atlanta forest at the center of the conflict over “Cop City,” using a range of media to explore how the contested landscape motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Through this work, she has produced two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work, and a photography exhibition, “Ways of the Atlanta Forest.”

Grace and Sasha made friends in the Atlanta forest, studied Torah together, and briefly shared an address while writing this essay.

Made possible by the Kyle J. and Sharon Krause Family Foundation, and run by The Nonfiction Writing Program, the Krause Essay Prize is awarded annually to the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying. Nominations for the Krause Essay Prize are made each year by a committee of writers, filmmakers, radio producers, visual artists, editors, and readers. The nominated essays then become texts in a graduate writing seminar offered by The Nonfiction Writing Program each spring, in which graduate students ultimately select the winning work.