The Department of Literatures in 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, research, critical writing, and instruction. We are pleased to announce our 2021 - 2022 student award winners.
Teaching Awards
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 Seth Strickland for the 2022-2023 academic year.
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. This year’s recipients are graduate students Victoria Baugh, Christina Fogarasi, Nathaniel Likert, Austin Lillywhite, and Peter Shipman, as well as MFA Lecturer Kathryn Diaz.
The Shin Yong-Jin/Harry Falkenau Graduate Teaching Fellowship, for demonstrated excellence in scholarship and teaching, is awarded to Kathryn Harlan-Gran for the 2022-2023 academic year.
Graduate Research Awards
The Alan Young-Bryant Memorial Graduate Award in Poetry was awarded to Joseph Miranda.
A David L. Picket '84 Summer Grant was awarded to Nathaniel Likert.
The David L. Picket '84 Summer Fellowship in Creative Writing was awarded to graduate students: Vivian Hu, Mackenzie Schubert Polonyi Donnelly, Mackenzie Berry, Courtney Michelle Raisin, Michael Lee, India Sada Hackle, and Rogelio Juárez.
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 India Sada Hackle.
The M. H. Abrams Summer Graduate Fellowship, which provides a summer stipend to support work towards completion of an English dissertation, was awarded to Jennifer Rabedeau.
The Truman Capote PhD Writer’s Award, providing summer fellowships for PhD or Joint MFA/PhD students in English who are also poets or fiction writers, was awarded to Shacoya Kidwell, Adam Sztela, and Richard Thomson.
Undergraduate Thesis Awards
The M.H. Abrams Undergraduate Thesis Prize winner was: Helena Brittain, “Something Akin to Freedom: Storytelling, Healing, and Crafting a Black Woman’s Public Voice in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”. Honorable mention was awarded to: Rachel Christopherson, “Reclaiming the Future: Queer Utopia and Eugenic Rhetoric.”
Creative Writing Awards
The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize graduate student winners were: 1st place, Sophia Veltfort for “Mare Liberum”; 2nd place, Sol Wooten for “Vien, Vien”; and an honorable mention was awarded to Rogelio Juárez for “Apostle.”
The Arthur Lynn Andrews Prize undergraduate student winners were: 1st place, Joseph Lang for “3 Stories”; 2nd place, Savannah Beck for “The Asteroid”; and an honorable mention was awarded to Kaylani Williams for “Ruptured Rainbows.”
The Corson-Browning Poetry Prize was awarded to graduate student Mackenzie Berry for “Rehearsing for Carnage” and undergraduate student Isaac Salazar for “I am Orphans of Aztlán.” An honorable mention was awarded to graduate student Sarah Iqbal for “Four Poems.”
The Robert Chasen Memorial Poetry Prize was awarded to: 1st place, graduate student India Sada Hackle for “Stacking Water”; 2nd place, undergraduate student Rachel Christopherson for “Emergent”; and an honorable mention was awarded to graduate student Winniebell Zong for “Six Thousand Miles to Tomorrow.”
The Dorothy Sugarman Poetry Prize was awarded to undergraduate student Anika Potluri for her poems entitled, "8 poems."
Essay Awards
The Barnes Shakespeare Prize was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st place winner Stephanie Tom for “Mind Over Matter: The ‘Monstrous Birth’ of Iago's Duality in Othello” and 2nd place winner, Greta Gooding for “Kingship and Power Struggles as an Art as Figured by Macduff in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth.”
The George Harmon Coxe Award in American Literature was awarded to undergraduate students: 1st place winner Claire Deng for “Aggregate Person: Radical Narration in Jean Toomer’s Cane”; 2nd place winner Jack Pickert for “Stevens, Emerson, Whitman: Three American Poets”; and 3rd place co-winners Emily Park for “The Dialectic of Love in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time” and Maria Siciliano for “The Problem of Address: On Citizen: An American Lyric.”
The Guilford Essay Prize was awarded to graduate students Sean Cosgrove (History Ph.D. Candidate) for “In Terror of Jack the Clipper: Sexual Violence and New (Hetero) Sexual Desire in Turn-of-the-Century America”; Pichaya Damrongpiwat (Literatures in English Ph.D., 2021) for “Fictions of Materiality in the Eighteenth-Century Novel”; Molly MacVeagh (Literatures in English Ph.D., 2022) for “Maintenance Work: Climate Fiction and Process Biology.”
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 students Ben Fried for “The Most Sympathetic Reader You Can Imagine: William Maxwell’s New Yorker and the Mid-Century Short Story”; Molly MacVeagh for “Reading the Grocery List: Epigenetics and Collectivity in Future Home of the Living God”; and Adam Szetela for “This Book is Dangerous! The Moral Crusade Over Literature for Young People.”
