Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss has been chosen as the winner of the 2008 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Biss will receive a $12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish Notes from No Man's Land in February 2009.

Robert Polito served as the outside judge for the contest.On choosing the winner, he said:
"Despite the nucleus of assay in essay, so many contemporary essayists tend to perform their insights, instead of inspect, probe, and overturn them. Although I can’t remember when I last found a new book of essays so insistently canny, so casually smart, as Eula Biss invokes her mother here, ‘The more distance she put between herself and what she knew, between her mind and the words it understood, the closer she felt to the imponderable.’ Biss’s occasions, whether history, race, identity, geography, space, heredity, or fate, are intractable, even imponderable, yet her intricate command and the elegance of her mind in motion originates in doubt, distrust, and self-skepticism. Biss writes essays the way Plutarch and Montaigne did—or if this sounds too classic for her passionate cool, also think James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Luc Sante."

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and it is given to an outstanding manuscript by an emerging author has published no more than two previous books of nonfiction.

Eula Biss was happy to learn that her book was selected as the winner. “It’s a particular honor to be offered a prize that has so consistently been awarded to interesting and innovative books of creative nonfiction by a press that has made itself a home for some of the most compelling new work in the genre,” she said. “I’m grateful to Robert Polito for selecting my book for this honor, and I’m delighted to be working with Graywolf.”

Graywolf Press Senior Editor Jeffrey Shotts had mutual praise for Biss. “Eula Biss’s essays are lyrically constructed forays—from one coast to another—into what it means to be American and white, a teacher and a writer, a witness and a seeker. As the reader follows her travels and observations, we also get an original insight into what it means to be human. Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays is a remarkable book and an important stride in what essay-making can be. We’re honored to publish it as the latest winner of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize.”

Biss will be honored at an event at the New School in New York on publication of the book in February 2009.