2018 Barnard Department of English Awards
Each year, the English Department awards named prizes to a few English majors in recognition of their scholarship and accomplishments. The prizes requiring writing submissions are open to those not majoring in English as well.
Recipients of the 2018 Departmental Awards:
The ESTELLE M. ALLISON PRIZE
For excellence in literature
Winner: Sylvia Korman
The ES CARRIGAN PRIZE
For graduate work in English
Winner: Linh "Thuy" Nguyen
The W. CABELL GREET PRIZE
To a major for excellence in English
Winners: Elizabeth Harding, Sophia Hotung, Clementine Ford
The WILLIAM HALLER PRIZE
Awarded annually by the Barnard English Department to a graduating senior for excellence in the study of English Literature
Winners: Ophira Berenholz, Shenel Ekici-Moling, Gabriela Hoberman
The SAINT AGATHA-MURIEL BOWDEN MEMORIAL PRIZE
For superior proficiency in the study of Chaucer and Medieval literature
Winner: Virginia Gresham
The STAINS-BERLE MEMORIAL PRIZE IN ANGLO-SAXON
For excellence in Anglo-Saxon language and literature
Winner: Kirby Eckels
Writing Prizes
The DORIS E. FLEISCHMAN PRIZE
For the student at Barnard judged by the Faculty of the English Department to have written the best short piece, fiction or non-fiction
Winner: Kyra Spence
The AMY LOVEMAN MEMORIAL FUND PRIZE
For the best original poem by a Barnard undergraduate
Winner: Kyra Spence
The LENORE MARSHALL BARNARD PRIZES
In prose and poetry
- Poetry winners:
Poetry: First Place: Michelle Xu, Mya Nunnally, and Morgan Crist
Second Place: Kyra Spence and Jade Levine
The SIDNEY MINER POETRY PRIZE
To the senior major who has shown distinction in the reading, writing, & study of poetry
Winners: Kyra Spence, Nora Mathison, Sara Larner
The HELEN PRINCE MEMORIAL PRIZE
For excellence in dramatic composition
Winner: Andrea Jo
The HOWARD M. TEICHMANN WRITING PRIZE
To a graduating senior for work distinguished in its originality of concept and excellence of execution
Winners: Emma Murdock and Ali Oshinsky
Based on Submissions
Awarded by Outside Judges:
The PETER S. PRESCOTT PRIZE FOR PROSE WRITING
For a work of prose fiction which gives the greatest evidence of creative imagination and sustained ability
- 1st place winners: Kyra Spence and Ali Oshinsky
- 2nd place winner: Juliana Kaplan
- 3rd place winners: Emma Murdock
- Honorable mention: Juliana Clark and Hannah Kofman
The HELENE SEARCY PULS PRIZE
For the best poem in an annual student competition
Winners:
Morgan Crist
Mya Nunnally
Michelle Xu
Jade Levine
Kyra Spence
Judged by Departmental Committee
The BURNS SOCIETY PRIZE
To the student who writes the best paper on a topic related to the poetry of the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns
Prize not awarded in 2018
The BRANDT PLAYWRITING AWARD
To the student who writes the most promising one-act play.
Winner: Mya Nunnally
2018 Prose Judges
Nellie Hermann
Nellie Hermann, Creative Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, has published two novels, The Cure for Grief (Scribner, 2008) and The Season of Migration (FSG, 2015), a New York Times< Editor's Choice. Her non-fiction has appeared in an anthology about siblings, Freud’s Blindspot (Free Press: 2010), as well as in Academic Medicine. Over the last ten years she has taught fiction and narrative medicine to undergraduates, medical students, graduate students, and clinicians of all sorts, and has given conference addresses in Iowa, California, Seoul, Korea, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2016 NEA Literature fellowship and a 2017-18 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
Jennifer Gilmore
Jennifer Gilmore is the author of three novels for adults, including The Mothers (Scribner, 2013), which is currently being adapted for film, starring Rachel Weisz, with Gilmore Executive Producing; Something Red (Scribner, 2009), a New York Times Notable Book, and Golden Country (Scribner 2006), also a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Jewish Book Award. (Scribner, 2006), and a novel for teens, We Were Never Here (Harper, 2016). Her work has appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies including The Atlantic, Bomb, BookForum, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, the New York Times, Real Simple, Salon, Tin House, Vogue and the Washington Post. She has been a MacDowell Colony fellow and has taught writing and literature at Barnard College, Cornell University, The New School, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, Fordham University, Harvard University and Princeton University. Her next novel, If Only, a young adult novel, will be published by Harper in summer 2018.
Malena Watrous
Malena Watrous is the author of the novel If You Follow Me, which received a Michener-Copernicus Award, and the young adult novel Sparked. She frequently reviews books for such publications as The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow, and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford, where she is currently the lead instructor helping to run the Online Creative Writing program for their continuing studies department.
2018 Poetry Judges
Brittany Perham
Brittany Perham’s Double Portrait won the 2016 Barnard Women Poets Prize, chosen by Claudia Rankine for poems that are “by turns playful, mournful, indulgent, musical, insightful, and all the way human.” She is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow.
Donna Masini
Donna Masini’s third book of poems, 4:30 Movie, is forthcoming (W.W. Norton and Co., 2018). She is the author of Turning to Fiction (W.W. Norton 2004), That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), and a novel, About Yvonne (W.W. Norton,1998). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Open City, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Pushcart Prize, Brooklyn Poets, Best American Poetry 2015. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, she is a Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program. She is at work on a novel, The Good Enough Mother.
Fiona Wilson
Fiona Wilson is the author of A Clearance (The Sheep Meadow Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and in several anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic, including Poetry Review, Edinburgh Review, The Antigonish Review, Literary Imagination, The Spectator, and New Writing Scotland. She grew up in Scotland and lives in New York City. She teaches literature at Sarah Lawrence College.