National Undergraduate Art & Writing Contest 2023
Poetry
selected by Katie Farris
Winner — “Thought Experiment” by Callan Latham (University of Iowa ‘23)
Runners Up —“Decimals” by Nine Reed-Mera (Bard ‘24)
“Shrinking Sestina for Women’s Bodies” by Emma Janssen (University of Chicago ‘24)
Katie Farris on Callan Latham
The language and syntax in “Thought Experiment” walks the delicate line between clarity and astonishment: for instance, in the second sentence of the piece, “The physics of slow water” surprises while producing a robust image, as does the line “her/ straight sharp teeth, humming above/ the twilight.” The final sentence of the poem, comprising nearly the last two stanzas, seems to me to be both a satisfying conclusion to the narrator’s arms looking “for ways to hunger anew” from the second sentence of the poem, as well as an almost metapoetic meditation on art, which could be called, as the author calls the mouse in the floorboards, “the truth that prefers not to speak.”
Fiction
selected by Daphne Kalotay
Winner — “West Coast Ghosts” by Margaret Dunn (University of Pennsylvania ‘23)
Runners Up — “Blue Boys” by Sierra Stern (Princeton ‘24)
“Prayer” by Rachel Lee (Emory ‘25)
Daphne Kalotay on Margaret Dunn
This moving, if painful, story amazed me on multiple fronts. For one thing, it is daring, its young narrator—an aspiring actor in contemporary Hollywood—at first appearing to be despicable. Only as we continue to read do we gradually (seemingly magically, so deftly is this done) understand the full desperation of his situation: self-loathing, semi-closeted, forced to hide his primary (highly inequitable) relationship due to the continued homophobia of the American movie industry. Without being didactic or melodramatic, the author presents a realistic, if nearly dystopian, world of "takers" and "givers" in a touching and ultimately satisfying story.
Art
Selected by Colleen Asper
Winner — “Trans Aggression” by Jude Kaveh (New York University ‘26)
Runners Up — “Corsetry” by Harley Pomper (University of Chicago ‘24)
“Up All Night” by JiHwan Park (New York University)
Honorable Mention — “Rager Teenager” by Andrei Barrett (New York University ‘25)
Colleen Asper on Jude Kaveh
Trans Aggression combines direct and forceful language and symbols, with a playful and provisional materiality. I chose it because of its exploratory approach to both form and content.
About Our Judges
Katie Farris’s most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), was listed as Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She’s also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the co-translator of many works, including A Country in Which Everyone’s Name is Fear, which was one of World Literature Today’s Notable Books of 2022. She’s a Pushcart Prize winner.
Image Credit: Ilya Kaminsky
Daphne Kalotay’s books include the award-winning novels Russian Winter, Sight Reading, and Blue Hours and two story collections: Calamity and Other Stories, shortlisted for The Story Prize, and The Archivists, winner of the Grace Paley Prize. Published in over twenty languages, her work has won fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Image Credit: Sasha Pedro
Colleen Asper is a painter, writer, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work compresses the painted body, the speaking body, and the performing body into one space as a way of increasing the friction that exists between stillness and motion, flatness and embodiment, language and materiality. The rub of these contradictions creates new possibilities for what the body can do.
Asper has had solo and two person exhibitions at galleries that include 17Essex, New York, NY; On Stellar Rays, New York, NY; P!, New York, NY; Art Production Fund Lab, New York, NY; Gallery 650, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA; and Steven Wolf Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and abroad at institutions that include The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Art in General, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; The Luminary, St. Louis, MO; New Galerie, Paris, France; OED Gallery, Cochin, India; Kunstverein Langenhagen, Hanover, Germany; and Lošinj Museum, Mali Lošinj, Croatia. Her work has been reviewed in publications that include Artforum, Art in America, frieze, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Additionally, she has contributed writing to publications such as Art Practical, The Brooklyn Rail, Lacanian Ink, and Paper Monument. Asper has been a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Wendy’s Subway (with the Art Workers’ Inquiry), Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, and the Jentel Artist Residency.
Image Credit: Brad Farwell