The Whiting Foundation has released its selections for the 2018 Creative Nonfiction Grant. The grant, which awards $40,000 to six authors of researched nonfiction books in progress, has been awarded in the past to prominent American authors Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Isabel Wilkerson, and others.

Here are the 2018 recipients, along with descriptions of their winning projects:

Jennifer Block
Everything Below the Waist: The Crisis in Women’s Health and Pleasure in the Age of Empowerment (St. Martin’s Press)
“An investigation of how the medical system is failing women, as well as a look back at the feminist health movement that strove for better care—and what happened to it.”

Andrea Elliott
Invisible Child (Random House)
“An examination of child poverty in 21st century America, as told through the story of one homeless girl and her family in New York City.”

Akash Kapur
Better to Have Gone (Scribner)
“An exploration of two troubling deaths in the author’s family, and of the forces of faith, ideology, idealism, and extremism at work in the utopian community where he grew up and returned to live as an adult.”

Jori Lewis
Slaves for Peanuts (The New Press)
“The captivating story of how peanut agriculture supported the rise and fall of slavery in nineteenth-century West Africa, and of the fugitive slaves who took back their freedom.”

Sarah Ramey
The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness (Doubleday)
“A memoir with a mission: to help the millions of (mostly) women who suffer from unnamed or misunderstood conditions, including autoimmune illnesses, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, chronic Lyme disease, and more.”

Jess Row
White Flights: Race, Fiction and the American Imagination (Graywolf Press)
“A novelist's exploration of how race unfolds in the American psyche—in novels, films, music, political discourse, and public space—combining wide-ranging criticism with a searching personal inquiry into the imaginative roots of white supremacy.”

Photo Credit: Whiting Foundation