2025 Neureuther Essay Contest Winners

WashU Libraries are pleased to announce the winners of the 37th annual Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition. Named for Carl Neureuther, a 1940 graduate of the Washington University School of Business who set up an endowed book fund for the Libraries, the contest was designed to inspire reading for pleasure among students and encourage the development of personal book collections.

The competition is open to all full-time Washington University students, and awardees win four cash prizes of $1000 and $500 at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Participants submit brief essays about the books in their collections. WashU faculty read the essays to select the award-winning entries.

Undergraduate Student Winners

In the undergraduate category, Grace Wereley-Bross, a first-year student majoring in environmental analysis, was awarded the first prize for her essay, “‘Those gentle wolves’: Reclaiming Little Red Riding Hood.” Joshua Miller, a first-year student majoring in English and art history, won second prize for his essay, “The Given, The Loved, and The Found: A Series of Communications Regarding My Ever-Changing Book Collection.”

Graduate Student Winners

Amy Peltz, an MFA student in creative writing, won the first prize in the graduate category for her essay, “Panel to Paragraph: How Comics Made Me a Writer.” Matthew Moore, a PhD student of English literature, won the second prize for his essay, “A History of Textuality: Foucault in the Margins of my Masculinity.”

The organizing committee thanks all the students who participated in this year’s contest. Neureuther competition’s award-winning essays, from 2003 to the present, can be accessed on Open Scholarship.