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 2017 - 2018 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 Nasrin Olla, Jonathan Reinhardt, and Zachary Price.
New this year are two Alumni-funded grant opportunities, stemming directly from the generous support on Giving Day from loyal English Department alums. Alumni-funded MFA Graduate Research Grants were awarded to Cristina Correa, Peter Gilbert, Shakarean Hutchinson, and Weena Pun. An Alumni-funded Book Award went to Laura Francis.
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 Christopher Berardino, Marquis Bey, Seth Koproski, and Matthew Kilbane.
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 Kaylin O’Dell in 2017-2018. The upcoming 2018-2019 Lectureship is awarded to Jane Glaubman.
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 Emily Rosello Mercurio.
The David L. Picket '84 Summer Fellowship in Creative Writing was awarded to graduate students Cristina Correa, Neal Giannone, Peter Gilbert, Shakarean Hutchinson, Emily Rosello Mercurio, Carl Moon, Weena Pun, and Lindsey Warren.
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 Jessica Abel, Aurora Masum-Javed, Zachary Price, Michael Prior, and Sara Schlemm.
The Shin Yong-Jin/Harry Falkenau Graduate Teaching Fellowship, for demonstrated excellence in scholarship and teaching, was held by Zachary Price in 2017-2018. The upcoming 2018-2019 Teaching Fellowship is awarded to both Amelia Hall and Gabriella Friedman.
The Alan Young-Bryant Memorial Graduate Award in Poetry went to graduate student Sara Schlemm.
M. H. Abrams Undergraduate Thesis Prizes went to: Jessica Brofsky, “Telling the Story That Can’t Be Told: The Textual and Traumatic Afterlife of Ophelia”; Miranda E. Hawkins, “Donna and Madonna: Reading the Works of the Pearl Poet as a Retort to Dante”; and Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson, “Situating S-Town: Narrative, Sound, New Media.”
The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize graduate student winners were: 1st place, Remy Barnes for “Sweet Thing”; 2nd place, Shakarean Hutchinson for “How to Kill Pigs”; and honorable mention was awarded to Neal Giannone for “The Glory of Dirt.” The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize undergraduate winners were: 1st place, Sonya Chyu for “If You’d Only Look”; 2nd place, Sylvia Onorato for “Tio”; and honorable mention was awarded to Summer Lopez Colorado for “Apricity: The Warmth of the Sun in Winter.”
The Barnes Shakespeare Prize winners were: 1st place, Patrick Kane for “‘Alas Poor World, What Treasure Hast Thou Lost!’: General Economy in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis”; 2nd place, Daniel Jones for “Fluid Identities and False Dichotomies in Antony and Cleopatra”; 3rd place, Jessica Brofsky for “More Woes Than Words: The Unvoicing of Female Resistance in Lucrece and Titus Andronicus.”
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize was awarded to: 1st place, undergraduate student Kevin Goh for “Assorted Poems”; 2nd place, graduate student Greg Brazeal for “Nature Poem No. 1, Nature Poem No. 4”; and honorable mention, to undergraduate student Laura Brigham for “Sandbridge, 2017 & Other Poems for Virginia.”
The Corson-Browning Poetry Prize was awarded to graduate student Olivia Milroy Evans for “Teichoscopia” and undergraduate student Katherine Pyne-Jaeger for “Landscape and Other Poems.” Honorable mention was awarded to undergraduate student Zachary de Stefan for “Comorbid and 7 Others.”
The George Harmon Coxe Award in American Literature was awarded to Rachel Whalen for “The Poetry of Progress: Albery A. Whitman and the Reconstruction of Racial Identity.”
The Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize was awarded to undergraduate student Megan Lee for “Half-Deer Half-Venus Flytrap” and honorable mention was awarded to Chi Kyu Lee for “Stuck Between Always and Never.”
The Moses Coit Tyler Award for the best essay by a graduate or undergraduate student in the fields of American History, literature, or folklore went to graduate students Gabriella Friedman for “‘The Tunnel That No One Had Made’: Colson Whitehead’s Infrastructural Speculation” and Katherine Thorsteinson for “Unsettling the Grounds of European-Indigenous Contact: Givenness, Forgetfulness, and Canadian Prairie Literature.”
In addition to these departmentally-bestowed honors, we would like to congratulate Marquis Bey, who has been awareded a 2018 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and Nasrin Olla, who has been awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Samuel Lagasse has been awarded a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to study Bangla in Kolkata, India for study during summer 2018. Also, Gabriella Friedman has been awarded a Huntington Fellowship to conduct research in the Octavia E. Butler Papers and Jonathan Reinhardt was awarded a Huntington Library Exchange Fellowship to Lincoln College, University of Oxford, for July.
