Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic (Tupelo Press)wins the 2025 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction

Core Associate Professor Jeffrey Pethybridge, PhD, serves as the Vice President for Academic Affairs & Chief Academic Officer. Jeffrey teaches and writes out of the genealogies of experimental writing across the long twentieth century into contemporary practices. His creative research and writing has focused on documentary and investigative poetics, eco-poetics, visual poetry, and writing in the embodied wake of trauma.

Recognized for excellence in innovative literature, the Big Other Book award honors books that push artistic and intellectual boundaries.

Judge’s citation: “In Force Drift: An Essay in the Epic, Jeffrey Pethybridge confronts the violence of the U.S. torture program with extraordinary formal intelligence and ethical rigor. Drawing on documentary poetics, political theory, and the epic tradition, this text seeks not merely to represent atrocity but to register the forces that sustain it, exposing the language, architectures, and abstractions through which state violence is concealed. At once intellectually demanding and morally urgent, Force Drift is a powerful act of reckoning and a remarkable work of documentary imagination.”