National Undergraduate Writing Contest

Spring 2021 Festival Winners

selected by Danez Smith (poetry) & Nyssa Chow (prose)

Poetry — Amelia Van Donsel (Bard ‘21)
“August Complex Fire”

Prose — Mia Nelson (Dartmouth ‘22)
”The Un-Virgin Un-Suicides”

Runners Up

Adesuwa Agbonile (Stanford ‘21), poetry — “elegy to box braid left Alone And Untended To on the stairs of my all-white high school”

Josie Beatrice Brody (Stanford ‘21), poetry — “Pantoum with Eczema”

Mina Jang (Duke), prose — “Broken Clock”

Griffin Daniel Somaratne (Stanford ‘23), poetry — “The Barbers”

Nik Wickerhauser (Wash U St. Louis ‘21), prose — “In the Chasm”

Honorable Mentions

James King (Dartmouth ‘21), poetry — “Self Portrait as No. 34 Bus from Dublin to County Meath”

Divya Serena Mehrish (Stanford ‘25), poetry — “This Inflection of Tongues”

Esther Abisola Omole (Stanford ‘21), poetry — “for grandma”

Tess Solomon (Princeton ‘21), poetry — “Preface”

Mira Stone (JHU ‘22), poetry — “Eating Prasad”

Eliza Bright Zimmerman (JHU ‘23), poetry — “Sailors’ Village”