The Department of English is host to many gifted student writers and teachers. Thanks to the generosity of various donors, annual prizes are awarded for outstanding work in poetry, fiction, critical writing, and instruction. We are pleased to announce our 2019 - 2020 student award winners below.
The M. H. Abrams Summer Graduate Fellowship, which provides a summer stipend to support work towards completion of an English dissertation, went to Pichaya Damrongpiwat.
The Truman Capote Ph.D. Writer’s Award, providing summer fellowships for PhD/Joint students in English who are also poets or fiction writers, went to Martin Cain, Alec Pollak and Seth Strickland.
The Joseph F. Martino '53 Lectureship in Undergraduate Teaching, which supports English undergraduate student seminars offering some form of a literary historical survey in the framework of a writing course, will be held by Matthew Kilbane for the 20-21 academic year.
The James McConkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award for Summer Support, established by his enduringly grateful student Len Edelstein '59, was awarded to graduate student Chi Le.
The David L. Picket '84 Summer Fellowship in Creative Writing was awarded to graduate students Anum Asi, Kathryn Diaz, Carlos Rafael Gomez, Ashley Hand, Chi Le, Yessica Martinez, Anastasia McCray, and Jasmine Reid.
The Martin Sampson Teaching Fellowship acknowledges the importance of one of the most vital parts of the profession of literature: the teaching of writing and reading to undergraduates. The recipients were graduate students Kristen Angierski, Olivia Milroy Evans, Amelia Hall, and Bojan Srbinovski, as well as MFA Lecturer Christopher Hewitt.
The Shin Yong-Jin/Harry Falkenau Graduate Teaching Fellowship, for demonstrated excellence in scholarship and teaching, is awarded to Olivia Milroy Evans for the 2020-2021 academic year.
The Alan Young-Bryant Memorial Graduate Award in Poetry went to Stephen Kim.
M. H. Abrams Undergraduate Thesis Prize winners were: Victoria Horrocks for “Artistic Sisterhood: The Conversation Between Virginia Woolf’s Fiction and Vanessa Bell’s Painting”; Alana Sullivan for “Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales,’ Sianne Ngai's ‘Ugly Feelings,’ and the Gender and Racial Politics of ‘Animatedness’”; and Jenny (Jia Ning) Xie for “A Bigger for Himself: Richard Wright and the Communist Desire.” An honorable mention was also awarded to April Townson for “Deus Est Machina: Technology and Death in Philip K. Dick’s ‘VALIS’ Trilogy.”
The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize graduate student winners were: 1st place, Sophia Veltfort for “Schism, 1995”; 2nd place, Zahid Rafiq for “In Small Boxes”; and honorable mention was awarded to Alice Rhee for “Teddy Bear.” The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize undergraduate winners were: 1st place, Seonah Kim for “Waking Up”; 2nd place, Caroline Pranckevicius for “Before My Love Comes Through”; and honorable mention was awarded to Yongyu Chen for “Buried Light.”
The Barnes Shakespeare Prize was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st place (3 winners), Shriya Perati for “Playwrights and Pageantry in ‘Othello,’ ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and ‘The Tempest’”; Gayatri Sriram for “Lady Macbeth as the Failed Witch of Shakespeare's ‘Macbeth’” and Annabel Young for “The Brainchild: Kurosawa's Ran and Shakespeare's Lear”; honorable mention was awarded to Ramneek Kaur Sanghera for “When Black Becomes the Absence of White: Race and Interracial Relationships in ‘Othello.’”
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize was awarded to: 1st place, undergraduate student Emma Bernstein for “Going Back to Placitas”; 2nd place, graduate student Kelly Hoffer for “Visitation”; and honorable mention to undergraduate student Brandon Axelrod for “A Young Fisherman.”
The Corson-Browning Poetry Prize was awarded to graduate student Susannah Sharpless for “Holocene” and undergraduate student Isabel Frabotta for “Last One Back.” Honorable mention was awarded to undergraduate student Cata Peñéñory for “Bruised Fruit.”
The Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize was awarded to undergraduate student Emma Bernstein for “¿Hija Blanca, por qué no hablas español?”
The George Harmon Coxe Award in American Literature was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st Place winners Peter Szilagyi for “Forms of Unknowing: The (Im)possibilities of Knowledge in Bishop and Brooks” and Annabel Young for “Noojimo'iwewin: Healing and Reclamation in ‘Love Medicine’”; 2nd Place winners, Sarah Lorgan-Khanyile for “Losing My Voice Again: Americans Reading Barthes, Barthes Reading Americans”; and Rebecca Marratta for “Liquid of Liberation: Water Figured as a Passageway in ‘Beloved’ and ‘Tar Baby.’”
The Moses Coit Tyler Award for the best essay by a graduate or undergraduate student in the fields of American History, literature, or folklore was awarded to graduate student Kelly Hoffer for “The Limits of the Cute: The Persistence of Use in Lorine Niedecker’s Poetics.”
The Guilford Essay Prize, given to the doctoral student in any field whose thesis is judged to display the highest excellence in English Prose was awarded to Nasrin Olla for “Reaching for Opacity: Contemporary Afro-Diasporic Literature.”
