2022 Creative Writing Prize Winners

The Creative Writing Prizes Ceremony will be held on Thursday, June 2, 2022 at 4 p.m. in Sanborn Library and will feature readings from prize winners and this year's judge, Chris Abani.

Chris Abani's books of fiction include The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song For Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, Graceland, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections are Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me The Sun: Collected Long Poems, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne's Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN Beyond the Margins Award, the Hurston Wright Award, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship, among many honors. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish, Romanian, Hebrew, Macedonian, Ukrainian, Portuguese, Dutch, Bosnian, and Serbian.

2022 Creative Writing Prize Winners

Academy of American Poets Prize, for the best poem or group of poems:

• Eliza Dunn, "Excavation"

The Erskine Caldwell Prize, for outstanding short story:

• Yevheniia Dubrova, "A Flat Tire"
• Chukwuka Odigbo, "A Sexual Assaulter Is Someone You Know"
• Jiyoung Park, "Our Summer"

The Grimes Prize, for any form of writing by a senior except plays:

• Willem Gerrish, "Patience"
• Karen Zheng, "burnt tongue"

Jacobson-Laing Award in Poetry, for the best manuscript of original poems:

• Migwi Mwangi, "Tendered Soils"

The Lockwood Prize, for any form of writing by a junior except plays:

• Thomas Brown, "New Text"

The Mecklin Prize, for best creative nonfiction or journalism:

• Christopher Cartwright, "Twenty-First Century Drugs"
• Maeve Fairbanks, "Landscape in a Bottle"
• Ellen O'Rourke, "Horseshoe Crabs and Queer Ecologies"

The Sidney Cox Memorial Prize, offered annually for that piece of undergraduate writing which most nearly meets those high standards of originality and integrity which Sidney Cox set for himself and for his students in his teaching and in his book, Indirections for Those Who Want to Write:

• Mia Anwar, "The Subway"
• Claire Callahan, "Drop Tower"
• Cia Gladden,"Tuesday"

The William C. Spengemann Award in Writing, for a work of prose or poetry distinguished by its formal precision, as well as its original, innovative, or iconoclastic approach to its subject matter:

• Abigail Bresler, "In the Closet of Expired Medicine"
• Emma Ginsberg, "Lunch After Death"
• Jade Haakonsen, "A Fragmented Bellflower"