Introduction

The Kenyon Review’s annual nonfiction contest was judged this year by Leslie Jamison, acclaimed author of The Empathy Exams, Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, among other books. From 635 entries, Jamison selected “Lowest of the Low on a High Red Hill” by Carrie Cogan as the winner. “The voice of this essay move[s] like wind through hollowed-out bone, to borrow one of its countless haunted images,” writes Jamison. “There’s an electric and infinitely compelling relationship dramatized here between various dimensions of the self — past and present, person and pathology — and pivots of mind and heart, moments of insight and feeling, that I will never forget.”