Anthony Aycock of Cary has won the 2026 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition for his essay “Evil, Rutherford County Style.”
Aycock will receive $1,000, and Ecotone will consider his essay for publication.
“Elegant, nuanced, and thought-provoking—all words I wrote in the margins as I read this seamless work of reportage and rumination, a crime of the past examined anew in light of the crimes of the present,” final judge Julie Marie Wade said of Aycock’s winning entry. “This writer weaves multiple voices and perspectives together with clarity and complexity, never sacrificing one for the other. Near the end, he acknowledges the reader directly: ‘Finally, there is the question of evil. Let’s talk about that.’ I was rapt. Out loud, I answered, ‘Yes, OK.’”
Aycock has written for Slate, the Washington Post, Literary Hub, the Missouri Review, the Gettysburg Review, and other venues. His newest book, Just Plain Filthy: The Story Behind Book Banning’s Trial of the Century, will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2026. In addition, he has spent 25 years working in government, academic, and private law libraries, as well as teaching academic and creative writing.
Wade selected “Death by Cargo Ship” by Rhonda Waterhouse of Wilmington for second place.
“I appreciate the deft blending of research, personal narrative, and images in this artful hybrid essay,” Wade said. “One ideal of creative nonfiction is the opportunity to learn more about another person’s unique experience of the world while simultaneously learning more about the subjects that enthrall them.”
Waterhouse earned a BS and MEd from Penn State University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction with an environmental focus from UNC Wilmington, where she now teaches. Rhonda is also a freelance environmental journalist in the Wilmington region. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, American Submariner, Coastal Review, and storySouth, among others. A former Brauer Fellow, she was a semifinalist for North Carolina Literary Review’s Alex Albright CNF Prize. She is working on a memoir exploring brain injury and the healing power of trees.
Canton’s Barbara Roether took third place here with her essay “Strangers in the Same Land,” of which Wade said, “I was moved by the thoughtful, tender, and humble quality of the writing in this essay. The writer’s powers of observation are keen, making every reader an implicit participant.”
Roether is a founding editor at Wet Cement Press (headquartered in “Papertown,” Canton, NC) and sometimes teaches at the Great Smokies Writing Program of UNC Asheville. Recent essays are forthcoming in Tricycle and Lost Magazine. Her second novel Free Girls is coming out later this year. Her first novel This Earth You’ll Come Back To (McPherson & Co. 2015) was winner of an Independent Press Award. She is the author of two poetry collections, Saraswati’s Lament and The Middle Atlas, as well as reviews and essays in Blaze Vox, Rain Taxi, The New York Journal of Books, Kyoto Journal and other venues. She has an MFA from Bard College where she studied with descendants of the Black Mountain School.
Final judge Julie Marie Wade’s recent collections include The Mary Years (Texas Review Press, 2024), selected by Michael Martone for the 2023 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, Quick Change Artist: Poems (Anhinga Press, 2025), selected by Octavio Quintanilla for the 2023 Anhinga Prize in Poetry, Fisk, By Analogy (CutBank Prose Chapbook Series, 2025), and The Latest: 20 Ghazals for 2020 (Harbor Editions, 2025), co-authored with Denise Duhamel. A finalist for the National Poetry Series and a winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. Her newest memoir, Other People’s Mothers, was published in September 2025 by University Press of Florida.
Sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and administered by the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington, the Rose Post Creative Nonfiction Competition encourages the creation of lasting nonfiction work that is outside the realm of conventional journalism. The contest is open to any legal resident of North Carolina or member of the NC Writers’ Network.
Rose Post worked for the Salisbury Post for fifty-six years as a reporter, feature writer, and columnist. She won numerous state and national awards for her writing and earned the NC Press Women’s top annual award four times. She received the O. Henry Award from the Associated Press three times, the Pete Ivey Award, and the School Bell Award for educational coverage. Nationally, she won the 1989 Ernie Pyle Award, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for human-interest writing, and the 1994 National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ Award.
The nonprofit North Carolina Writers’ Network is the state’s oldest and largest literary arts services organization devoted to writers at all stages of development. For additional information, visit www.ncwriters.org.