The Peregrine Prize from the Academy of American Poets
Awarded to the best original poetry by a graduate student
Winner: Julien Brugeron, “Failure Is Their Orphan”
Contest judge Laura Mullen writes:
This was not an easy choice, but, for its deft and confident codeswitching, for its easy erudition and the clear brilliance of its (original and effective) images; for its impressive exploration of a number of forms including prose poetry and the poet’s theater, for its sophisticated understanding of how music can impact mood, and its graceful movement through an extraordinary variety of tones, “Failure Is Their Orphan” emerged as the clear winner from this remarkably strong field of entries. While “Act I” is almost a Brautigan update, self-aware, amusing, and imaginative, the complicated overlay of impulses in “Act II” shows the author’s enormously impressive ability to work with and build on the complex understanding of the lyric poem which emerged at the end of the 20th century, and “Act III” dwells comfortably in a charged intimacy where boundaries between self and other, body and landscape, effectively dissolve. Surprising, engaging, and very accomplished work, promising further astonishments.
The College Alumni Society Poetry Prize
Awarded to the best original poetry by an undergraduate student
Winner: Wes Matthews, “LOVE SONG REDUX” and other poems
Contest judge Laura Mullen writes:
From the opening of the first poem we know we are in the hands of a real poet, someone who understands that each line is a leap into the void — and makes us eager to take that jump. Wes Matthews’ ability to get inside the contemporary human situation from an angle that feels as right and strange as it is insightful is something very special. In these poems we see the poet using his considerable emotional intelligence on issues of love, freedom, race, class, and age — making sure we inhabit the difficulties and stay with the trouble. When this poet says, “I have lived all those lives at once / & brought them back to one / new origin,” I believe him. “Always rambling along the risk of existing, spellbound to sound,” Matthews’ poems take us places we need to go.
Second Place: Ollie Dupuy, “I Inherit the Women in My Family” and other poems
Contest judge Laura Mullen writes:
Under-explored and urgent subject matter is handled here with prodigious skill and remarkable tenderness—in a compelling and original voice. To read Ollie Dupuy’s work is to be, suddenly, joyfully, intimate with brilliance, stunned and enlightened by writing which deftly opens the complicated heart and explores the impact of immigration over generations. Courageous, compassionate, and clear-eyed, Dupuy is writing poems which are likely to find a large and grateful audience. This is the work of a skilled and gifted poet, someone who — I am sure — we will be reading with attention and delight for decades to come.
Third Place: Cynthia Zhou, “After Seven Years” and other poems
Contest judge Laura Mullen writes:
Exquisitely attentive to the sound of language and the feeling of being in the world (or worlds, for the author’s subject includes the “heartland’s / space station”), this generous selection of powerful and genuine poems make the action of remembering feel, again, like embodied, risky, and terribly important work. At ease in a variety of forms, grounding ecstatic visions in solid details (sketched with a fine economy), and showing — unfailingly — a wisdom about what must be said and when, the poems of Cynthia Zhou “coax mercy” from encounters with places and people, and are a great gift to her audience.
Honorable mention: Erin O’Malley, “Scoliotic Sestina…” and other poems
Contest judge Laura Mullen writes:
Lovely sense of the line, wonderfully vivid images, a nice array of forms, fresh subject matter handled with exciting skill: these poems will haunt me! This “Honorable Mention” fourth place is invented to convey my admiration: what an extraordinary writer!
About the judge:
Laura Mullen is the author of eight books and the McElveen Professor of English at LSU. Recognitions for her poetry include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award. Recent poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Ritual and Capital, and Bettering American Poetry. In 2018 she was the Arons poet at Tulane and affiliate faculty at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Her translation of Veronique Pittolo’s Hero was published by Black Square Editions in 2019. She had a Headlands Center Residency for Spring 2020—now she’s sheltering in place.
The Phi Kappa Sigma Fiction Prize
Awarded to the best original short story by an undergraduate student
Winner: Daniel Finkel, “Eat Him by His Own Light”
Contest judge Tony Tulathimutte writes:
If you’d told me last week, “Dude, you have got to read this 100% earnest story written from the perspective of a deer,” I would have answered No, and then Why are we talking about this. But Daniel Finkel has pulled off a major stylistic flex here, equally psychedelic and believable, selling us on an entire reality; I mean look at these descriptions: “the citrus-fire smell of the acid” when an antler punctures a car battery (“even death is made better by antlers”), or pain that is “astonishing, cyclopean” when our narrator gets shot midway through. This story is like Bambi from the perspective of Bambi’s mother, a gorgeously vivid story about the unkillable dignity of the animal in a world of human trash. Deer story best story! Deer story times one thousand!
Second Place: Elizabeth Lemieux, “X”
Contest judge Tony Tulathimutte writes:
This is a legit dark story about Grace, an eerily deadpan content moderator for the unnamed social media site “X.” If we expect Grace to be traumatized by her exposure to ultraviolence, we get quite the opposite — she seems to get a kick out of it, but it’s never totally clear why. She’s the kind of person who Google-stalks internet creeps and turns down dates because “I liked to keep my evenings free, for eating and smoking and true crime documentaries.” Sort of like the whole deal with The Stranger’s Meursault, the controlled ambiguity of Grace’s motives forms the story’s core mystery; the wonderfully ironic ending turns a banal #MeToo moment inside out, as we’re left to wonder just how much she’s internalized of the limitless horror she presides over daily.
Third Place: William Miller, “Necrolog”
Contest judge Tony Tulathimutte writes:
A 13-year-old, trapped in Bulgaria with his sick grandfather when both his parents die, finds escape in the surreal world of VR chat, where he watches toads get baptized, volunteers for public execution, and gets catfished by a catboy. When the grandfather, too, dies, leaving the narrator alone in a foreign country with nobody to care for him, the fluid phantasmagoria of the virtual world seems to hemorrhage into the real: lilac moths swarm out of bathwater, an unexplained “necrolog” appears across the street. What does it all mean? IDK! But it’s well-written and creepy-fun, what more do you want?
Honorable Mentions: Caroline Curran, Lucca Cary, Adina Singer
About the judge:
Tony Tulathimutte’s novel Private Citizens was called “the first great millennial novel” by New York Magazine. A graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has written for The New York Times, VICE, WIRED, The New Yorker, N+1, The New Republic, and others. He has received a 2017 Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award. He runs a writing class in Brooklyn called CRIT (crit.works).
The Judy Lee Award for Dramatic Writing
Awarded to a graduate or undergraduate student for the best script (stage, screen, television, or radio)
Winner: Alishan Valiani, “The Parking Ticket”
Contest judge Aya Ogawa writes:
A heart-rending story of a destitute rickshaw driver in Pakistan whose familial obligations and financial debts drive him to commit suicide — except after his first failed attempt, he is recruited to be a suicide bomber. This ambitious screenplay with surprising and intricate turns weaves together a personal narrative with the political and moral to portray a complex web of the powers that exert control over one man’s life.
Second Place: Nicole Novo, “Gibberish”
Contest judge Aya Ogawa writes:
Well-constructed script about a young man who struggles to and then suddenly finds approval and respect from his conservative Christian family and community when, after a slight injury, he begins to speak in tongues. The story is told tightly and builds tension, as well as empathy and depth for its characters.
Third Place (tie): Mary Osunlana, “The Perfect Woman”
Contest judge Aya Ogawa writes:
The bittersweet story of a young woman who discovers her late mother’s legacy is not as flawless as it seemed.
Third Place (tie): Samantha Friskey, “All the Dead Frogs”
Contest judge Aya Ogawa writes:
Friskey presents a jagged, passionate and urgent piece that delves into the profound question of how humankind must reconcile itself with mass extinction and the end of the world.
About the judge:
Aya Ogawa is a Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer and translator whose work reflects an international viewpoint and utilizes the stage as a space for exploring cultural identity and the immigrant experience. They have written and directed many plays including oph3lia (HERE) and Ludic Proxy (The Play Company). Most recently they wrote, directed and performed in The Nosebleed (Under the Radar Festival) and directed Haruna Lee’s Suicide Forest (Ma-Yi). They are currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a Usual Suspect at NYTW, and a recent Artist-in-Residence at BAX. ayaogawa.com.
The Lilian and Benjamin Levy Award
Awarded to the best review by an undergraduate student of a current play, film, music release, book, or performance
Winner: Wes Matthews, “Soul Music as the Soundtrack to Love”
Contest judge Laura Miller writes:
First-person material can be a crutch for young critics, but this piece balances that against a broader social perspective and binds the two elements together with just the right amount of lyricism. It’s heartfelt without presuming that the writer’s heart is all the reader needs to care about. I learned from this piece, as well, which is something all good criticism should aspire to do.
Second Place: Samuel Yellowhorse Kesler, “Mitski is at Her Peak Performing Central Park”
Contest judge Laura Miller writes:
I have nothing but respect for anyone who writes well about music, and the way this piece conveys the fleeting experience of a live performance makes it even more impressive to me. Sometimes all you really need to do is tell your reader what it felt like to encounter a work. This is vivid but not florid, and made me feel as if I’d been there, too.
Third Place: Sara Merican, “Before Parasite, There was Burning, Re-viewing Lee Chang-dong’s Film”
Contest judge Laura Miller writes:
The critic has clearly observed the work with great care and thought about it deeply. Some criticism is a performance, a display of writing, but this represents something else: an intense, fruitful engagement with the work that the critic shares with her readers.
About the judge:
Laura Miller is books and culture columnist for Slate. She is a co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked for 20 years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Guardian and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word.” She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000).
The Ezra Pound Prize for Literary Translation
Awarded to the best English-language translation of verse or prose from any language by a graduate or undergraduate student
Winner: Samantha Friskey, translation of “Little Lessons in Eroticism” by Gioconda Belli (Spanish)
Contest judge Lindsay Turner writes:
This poem strains and sweats, sings the female body in the language of the seas and the stars, caressing and holding back and caressing again. The slight whimsical humor of its title — “little lessons” — belies the power of this poem, carried over into English in Friskey’s translation, as it works its poetic imperative to open up a world of pleasure.
Second Place: Zhiqiao (Kate) Jiang, translation of “Diary” by Haizi (海子) (Chinese)
Contest judge Lindsay Turner writes:
Haizi’s “Diary” echoes with the grief of distances, deserts, and desolations. In Jiang’s translation, the simplicity of its declarations and the intricacy of its repetitions — “Sister, tonight I have only the Gobi Desert” — make the poem haunt like a ghost voice long after a first reading.
Third Place: Anika Prakash, translation of three poems by Antonio Machado (Spanish)
Contest judge Lindsay Turner writes:
Prakash’s translations of these three poems by Antonio Machado convey a lonely, longing poetic presence whose gaze lingers over the surrounding world so lightly as to be almost not there. These poems avoid sentimentality even as they evoke a realm of love and loss communicated in dark and lovely images of light and air, village-scapes and the natural world.
About the judge:
Lindsay Turner is the author of Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018). Her translations from the French include adagio ma non troppo by Ryoko Sekiguchi (Les Figues Press, 2018) and The Next Loves by Stéphane Bouquet (Nightboat Books), as well as several books of contemporary philosophy. She is the recipient of a 2017 French Voices Grant for her translation of Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life, forthcoming from Nightboat in 2022. She is currently Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.
The Gibson Peacock Prize for Creative Nonfiction
Awarded to the best creative nonfiction piece by an undergraduate student
Winner: Sophia DuRose, Untitled
Contest judge Sophie Lewis writes:
“For a brief period of time,” writes DuRose in the perfectly poised, unobtrusively shocking opening to this memoir of a violent alcoholic, “I thought water could spoil, because every time I asked my father for a sip of his water, it stung my tongue as if I were swallowing pins.” Part of what makes DuRose’s untitled piece so compelling is its refusal both to justify and to sugarcoat its profound forgiveness of the abuse it so vividly chronicles. It conveys the author’s aporia with regard to this lamentable, “soggy-hearted” figure, the late Doug DuRose, with courageous intelligence and upsetting skill.
Second Place: Javier Peraza, “Candles for Lucas”
Contest judge Sophie Lewis writes:
The reader of this piece is hooked by the intriguing fact of an outsize nocturnal repeat-shipment of votive candles to the author’s house following a death. We then move with disconcerting smoothness through a handful of vignettes from a (roughly) five-year period in the life of a nuclear household featuring three sons, at least one of whom is driven out of the house by the drunken physical assaults perpetrated on them, and on their mother, by the father. Peraza, throughout, demonstrates solidarity with their brother but resists tying things up in a bow, landing more than one good joke. The narration is pitched perfectly, puncturing (for instance) the bubble of a cheap candle-related metaphor for the ‘lesson learned,’ immediately after it has been proposed. There is wisdom here.
Third Place: Samuel Kesler, “Look at the Lamps”
Contest judge Sophie Lewis writes:
In this short, deft meditation on the art of watching bad movies, Samuel Kesler puts across a critique of critique, and an argument about interpretation, almost imperceptibly, by means of personal anecdote. The reader is borne along on Kesler’s charmingly unpretentious and candid recollections on the subject of watching Seasons 1 through 5 of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988-1993) and what the experience has brought to Kesler’s life. Then the thesis statement drops in the final paragraph, with a citation from none other than John Waters.
Honorable Mention: Samantha Claypoole, “Danse Macabre”
About the judge:
Sophie Lewis is a nonfiction writer based in Philadelphia, a visiting scholar at the Alice Paul Center, and the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019). Her essays and articles of queer cultural criticism have appeared in, for example, The New York Times, Boston Review, The London Review of Books and Viewpoint magazines, as well as academic journals such as Signs, Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, and Science as Culture. Sophie also occasionally translates books and essays from German and French into English: for example, A Brief History of Feminism (Antje Schrupp), Communism for Kids (Bini Adamczak), and The Future of Difference: Beyond the Toxic Entanglement of Racism, Sexism and Feminism (Paula Villa and Sabine Hark). A graduate of the University of Oxford (BA English Literature; MSc Nature, Society and Environmental Policy) and the New School for Social Research (MA Politics), she earned her PhD (2016) in human geography at the University of Manchester. She is a member of the writing collective Out of the Woods, whose book Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis is forthcoming (Common Notions 2020), and an editor at Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry.
The Parker Prize for Journalistic Writing
Awarded to the best newspaper or magazine article, feature story, exposé or other piece of investigative journalism (published or unpublished) by an undergraduate student
Winner: Rowana Miller, “The Ghosts of Locust”
Contest judge Daisy Hernández writes:
Miller wove together with great style the results of her reporting and research while also creating a fantastic sense of place. This piece is delightful and informative and made me want to be on campus.
Second Place: Madeline Ngo, “Kay Granger, only GOP woman from Texas in Congress, keeps low profile but has plenty of influence”
Contest judge Daisy Hernández writes:
Ngo’s portrait is a poignant reminder of the times in which we live and the decisions elected officials make every day. I appreciated the number of perspectives Ngo sought and the way she seamlessly brought it all together on the page.
Third Place: Lauren Drake, Untitled
Contest judge Daisy Hernández writes:
This is an incredibly necessary story about Tourette Syndrome. It covers not only the author’s experience but those of other students, as well as a neurologist, and it raises urgent questions about work and disability.
About the judge:
Daisy Hernández is the author of the award-winning memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed and coeditor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. The former editor of ColorLines magazine, she has reported for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Slate, and she has written for NPR’s All Things Considered and CodeSwitch. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Aster(ix), Bellingham Review, Brevity, Dogwood, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Juked, and The Rumpus among other journals. A contributing editor for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle, Daisy is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Miami University in Ohio.
The Creative Writing Honors Thesis Prize
Awarded to the most outstanding honors thesis
Winners:
Briar Essex for “transcripts: Or, a provisionary poetics”; advisor: Jeff T. Johnson
Caroline Curran for “Ultraviolet Line”; advisor: Karen Rile
About the award: Our judges have decided that each of these three projects articulates such a distinct sense of craft, form, method, and linguistic vitality that they will share this year's thesis prize. Each is a writing project that exceeds the boundaries of the undergraduate honors thesis program, that struck the panel as coherent and complete in its execution, and that shows maturity of vision and command of craft. Congratulations, Briar and Caroline!