We had another full roster of absolutely amazing honors theses this year, and we are so very proud of everyone! You can find a recording of our thesis reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVt35oxzKiQ
The winner of this year's Creative Writing Honors Thesis Prize is Jamie Albrecht, for the poetry manuscript "What Have You."
Here is an excerpt from one of our judges' remarks on Jamie's project:
This formally diverse, exciting manuscript articulates an overarching concern with the notion of accretion—the collection of images, of memories, of citations and references—and accretion is central to the materiality of the text, from its intensity of detail to its uses of footnotes. But in that notion of accretion is also a central concern with the ethics of the way we relate to things, to texts, and to each other. The manuscript's highly creative uses of footnotes serve not simply to cite or boast about sources, but to pay homage and to think carefully about the ethics and politics of borrowing another person’s language, or writing in response to another person’s idea. In this way Jamie’s work links up with one of the most pressing conversations in contemporary literary practice right now—the ethics and politics of appropriation—and I think his project is poised to make a major intervention into that conversation.
Please join us in congratulating Jamie!