Te Nason Smith Prize honors outstanding writing, awarding $100 and publication in Images. In this issue, Professor Moss awarded the prize for the best non-fiction essay to “Te Grape Leaves Tat Rise” by Ameera Salamah. Professor Moss remarks on the essay:


“Te Grape Leaves Tat Rise” transforms a recipe into a meditation on memory, loss, and Palestinian resilience. Te author’s choice to structure the narrative around the meticulous preparation of warak diwali proves effective, as each step of folding grape leaves becomes a vessel for grief, connection, and cultural preservation. Sensory details ground the work: pomegranate molasses as “liquid rubies,” the grandmother’s “rough hands” mixing ingredients, the leaves turning from “bright green to a depressed olive green.”


What elevates this piece beyond memoir is its refusal to separate the intimate from the political. Te invocation of Mahmoud Darwish, the acknowledgment of a “world that denies my existence,” and the final assertion that “joy is resilience too” ground personal loss within collective struggle without ever becoming didactic. Te author’s voice remains tender yet unflinching, honoring both the grandmother who still thinks of her deceased daughter and the broader Palestinian experience of endurance through everyday acts of love. Tis is food writing as witness, as inheritance, as resistance—quite an achievement.


— Jackson Moss, Professor of English


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