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 2018 - 2019 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 Brianna Thompson.
The Truman Capote Ph.D. Writer’s Award, providing summer fellowships for Ph.D./Joint students in English who are also poets or fiction writers, went to Maggie O’Leary and Peter Shipman.
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, was held by Jane Glaubman in 2018-2019. The upcoming 2019-2020 Lectureship is awarded to Jonathan Reinhardt.
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 Nneoma Ike-Njoku.
The David L. Picket '84 Summer Fellowship in Creative Writing was awarded to graduate students Remy Barnes, Christopher Hewitt, Nneoma Ike-Njoku, Alice Mercier, Charlotte Pattison, Frances Revel, Sasha Smith, and Alice Turski.
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 Grace Catherine Greiner, Becky Lu, and Zachary Price, as well as MFA Lecturers Rocio Anica and Michael Prior.
The Shin Yong-Jin/Harry Falkenau Graduate Teaching Fellowship, for demonstrated excellence in scholarship and teaching, was held by Amelia Hall and Gabriella Friedman in 2018-2019. The upcoming 2019-2020 Teaching Fellowship is awarded to Becky Lu.
The Alan Young-Bryant Memorial Graduate Award in Poetry went to Christopher Berardino, Amelia Hall, James Ingoldsby, and Matthew Kilbane.
M. H. Abrams Undergraduate Thesis Prize winners were: 1st place, Gina Hsu for “Thinking in the Void with Gilles Deleuze and Gaspar Noé” and Alexander Lugo for “Repetition, Possibility and Change in Beowulf”; 2nd place, Patrick Kane for “The (General?) Economy of Literature: An Alternative Reading of the Poetry of the 1590s” and Jeremiah Kim for “Juche Jimmy: James Baldwin, U.S. Imperialism, and the Korean Independence Struggle”; and honorable mention was awarded to Elena Silverberg for “Cyborgs and Significant Beings: Defying the Personhood of Literary Character in Science Fiction” and Rachel Whalen for “Nepantla Poetics: Queer Transcendence in the Poetry of Gloria E. Anzaldúa.”
The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize graduate student winners were: 1st place, Remy Barnes for “The Eventual Return of All Lost Things”; 2nd place, Nneoma Ike-Njoku for “Home”; and honorable mention was awarded to Chelsea Thomeer for “In a Family Way.” The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize undergraduate winners were: 1st place, Julia Shebek for “Sprint”; 2nd place, Teagan Todd for “Wingspan”; and honorable mention was awarded to Mike Yunxuan Li for “Behind the Birch Woods.”
The Barnes Shakespeare Prize was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st place, Eliana Rozinov for “What’s the Matter on Hamlet’s Tables?: Apparition, Erasure, and Affect”; 2nd place, Andrew Peiser for “‘These Broken Limbs’: Witnessing Titus” and Natalie Brooks for “Cleopatra's Resistance to Historical Misrepresentation in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra”; 3rd place, Colton Poore for “Every Ending Is a Promise of Unfulfillment: Troubled Conclusions in Titus Andronicus, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.”
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize was awarded to: 1st place, undergraduate student Veronica Perez for “City of Willows”; 2nd place, graduate student Richard Thomson for “Otherwise Diets”; and honorable mention, to graduate student Alice Turski for “Looking for Jade Rabbit”.
The Corson-Browning Poetry Prize was awarded to graduate student Matt Kilbane for Poems from ‘A New You’ and undergraduate student Teagan Todd for salomé. Honorable mention was awarded to graduate student Bryce Thornburg for Then Again.
The George Harmon Coxe Award for Fiction was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st Place Katherine Pyne-Jaeger for “The Summer People”; 2nd Place, Sonya Chyu for “But What If It’s Incurable”; and honorable mention to Miranda Sasinovic for “April.”
The George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st Place Katherine Pyne-Jaeger for “Militia Amoris”; 2nd Place, Abigail Mengesha for “Abyssinica Apikalia—A Sighting”; and honorable mention to Mark Golub for “Village Vanguard.”
The Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize was awarded to undergraduate student Emma Eisler for “Drift” and honorable mention was awarded to Rachel Whalen for Non; not; none: An Excavation of Non-Binary in Four Poems.
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 Matt Kilbane for “A Speech-Musical Modernism: Harry Partch's Lyric Media” and undergraduate student Alana Sullivan for “Alternative Recipes for Queerness in the Kitchen: Recasting The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in The Book of Salt.”
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: 2019 winner James Macmillen for “The Phoenix Keepers: An Anthropology of Futurity in Detroit City Hall” and 2018 winner Kristie Schlauraff for “Sounding Bodies and Voices in Nineteenth-Century British and American Gothic Fiction.”
