2025 Winner

Leslie Jamison is a New York Times bestselling author whose writing blends personal narrative, cultural criticism, and literary reportage. She has written about a wide range of subjects, from addiction to ultramarathons, C-sections to chronic illness, bathhouses to past life memories, for publications like The New Yorker and Virginia Quarterly Review. 

The Empathy Exams is a collection of essays that explore loneliness, intimacy, and the limits of shared feeling. Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Jamison’s essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others — how we care about and feel each other’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, and performed. It was chosen as a Notable Book of 2014 and an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times, was named one of the Top 10 Books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Oprah, Slate, Salon, The L Magazine, and Time Out: New York.  

The Recovering is a memoir that unpacks the stories we tell about addiction, examines what we want those stories to do, and questions what happens when they fail us. At the heart of the book is Jamison’s ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence. The Recovering was named the Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Entertainment Weekly, the best-reviewed memoir of 2018 by LitHub, and was a finalist for the American Booksellers Association Book Award.  

Make It Scream, Make It Burn is a collection of fourteen essays that examine longing and obsession. Among Jamison’s subjects are 52 Blue, “the loneliest whale in the world;” past-life memories of children; and the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life. Jamison follows these examinations to more personal reckonings with romance, marriage, and maternity. Both Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams were finalists for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.  

Jamison’s memoir and her most recent work, Splinters, examines single parenting in the aftermath of divorce. She turns her perception towards some of the most intimate relationships of her life, examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once, and the experience of grieving the departure of one love while celebrating the arrival of another. 

Jamison is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and her essays and literary criticism have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Oxford American, A Public Space, Boston Review, Bookforum, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Believer. She edited the 2017 edition of Best American Essays, and has written introductions for recent editions of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days and the photographer Ryan Spencer’s Such Mean Estate. She has also authored a novel, The Gin Closet, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. 

Jamison is a graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ MFA Workshop, and holds a PhD in English from Yale University. She joined the Columbia University faculty in 2015, earning tenure in 2023. She was the 2024-2025 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, and the Corporation of Yaddo. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.