by Writing Workshops Staff
5 months ago
Every fall, one anthology quietly takes the measure of American nonfiction — and the 2025 volume arrived with a guest editor whose own essays have helped define the form. The Best American Essays 2025, guest edited by Jia Tolentino, was published by Mariner Books on October 21, 2025. You can read the full announcement here.
This is part of a tradition that runs deep. The Best American Series, published by Mariner/HarperCollins, is the premier annual showcase for the nation’s finest short fiction and nonfiction — a project first launched in 1915 with the debut of The Best American Short Stories, and one that has come to capture the shifting identity and literary vitality of American writing. Each volume is the result of a collaboration between a series editor and a guest editor, who together read thousands of pieces published the previous year before the guest editor settles on the twenty-some that make the final cut.
The 2025 essays make for a bracing gathering. It’s a searing collection that moves through war, fear, memory, grief, nature, poverty, and excess — each piece a window into the questions that shape our time, bold and vulnerable and unafraid to dwell in uncertainty. The volume arrives dressed in a cover illustration by Cologne-based visual artist, illustrator, and designer Thomas Heinz, part of the fresh visual identity now unifying the series.
And then there are the writers. The contributors to The Best American Essays 2025 include Sarah Aziza, Mosab Abu Toha, Carolyn Forché, Christina Sharpe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Nuar Alsadir, Laura Glen Louis, Eula Biss, Hannah Keziah Agustin, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Jarek Steele, Namwali Serpell, Laura Preston, Angie Romines, Summer Hammond, Khalil AbuSharekh, Linda Kinstler, Greg Jackson, Christian Lorentzen, Mathew Denton-Edmundson, and William Deresiewicz. It is the kind of table of contents you read twice — a roll call of essayists working at the very top of the form, each of them proof of how much range and force the essay still holds.
We’ll be returning to these essays for a long time, and pressing them on everyone we know.
A quiet point of pride to tuck in down here, where it belongs: one of those contributors, Jarek Steele, once spent a little time in Process and Practice: Developing a Writing Life that Supports Both Creativity and Production with Steve Adams at WritingWorkshops.com — long before this particular honor came calling.
If anything, we’re simply thrilled to read all of the work in this issue.
Great writing rarely happens alone. If you’re looking for the community, expert instruction, and steady encouragement that help writers find their voice and reach their readers, explore our full slate of online creative writing workshops. Your own story is waiting to begin.
