Judge's comments: 

Seven Statements about “Drove”

1) The (arresting) simplicity of these sentences startles me awake.

2) If a drove is a heard of animals, then this poem drives something vulnerable across its

length, something about awe, memory, reason, and love.

3) We approach the shoreline again and again like a recurring dream, though never with

an oneiric haziness. A matter-of-fact fog that burns away.

4) This sequential poem derives its power from repetition, revision, recombination—

volatile acts contained inside the angular, justified form.

5) Magnificent, the exposition of glitched up re-soundings that appear inexhaustible.

6) “Drove” ruminates on the mycelial communication network, and upon rereading, I

sense the sentences themselves grow thickly interwoven, nerve-like filaments with

electrical impulses that drive the “I” around various perspectives.

7) Here: poetic language reaches for an oceanic feeling.

Judge's comments: This is a fierce, fierce engagement with cross-disciplinary poetics: personal, wounded, surrounded by its family and very much working within a wounding world, its sharp edges captured, full of everyday and unnecessary things or detritus, partly covering a bureaucratic, life-constricting form. The poem opens up suddenly in “(all caps)” no less, and then, as suddenly, it may slam shut, for a time. But finally, it struts out into the world to take whatever form it must, celebrating its “banshee ways."

Judge's comments: These are prose pieces that have to be prose pieces because of the predictability of the syntax.  It is not music of language, then that is driving this, but a striking and energetic clustering of feelings, considerations and some elements of intellectual and emotive narrative.  The form is right for it, and the pieces have a sensitivity and delicacy that is lovely, a quirkiness that is generous in its vulnerability.

Judge's comments: These are poems of unsettling visions, the dance between memory and the occasional hauntings of the imagination.  What sits as calmly constructed language, of even assured syntax and diction, slowly folds, in poem after poem, into deeply troubling expressions of fear, loss and danger.

Judge's comments: An almost perfect, quietly celebratory evocation of life as after-party, of persons (even dolts) as waves in a tide after it's over and love has remained elusive. Nonetheless, we can still turn our "face towards the / day, speaking to it like a lover.” Softly striking the reader as a pair of prose poems, the minimal formal gestures of these matching passages and their careful word choices build a coherent poetic image from a continuous multiplicity of original and real-world perceptions.

Judge's comments: “Dry Season” is a subtle and graceful work that thrives in the space between prose poem, fable and vignette. Brief without bluntness and mystical in profoundly human ways, the work moves with assurance the way good fiction often does—one good sentence at a time. The philosophical inquiry at the center of the narrative stays implicit, allowing sheer narrative to drift us through a landscape of sand and fig trees where a mother uses clay to make a child. “Dry Season” is a work sprung from a mind of clear intelligence. It does spirit-work. It reaches into myth. 

Judge's comments: “Wrath” is funny because it’s serious. It starts with news of a coming hurricane – nothing funny there – and then veers into a delightful exploration of how we make sense of nonsense. What do we do about the wrath of God? Run from it? Give it a gender-neutral name? “Wrath” reminds us that every response to the incomprehensible contains trace amounts of farce. Just look at what happens when the narrator’s old-school dad hears that the hurricane is named after a woman: “When they announced the name of the incoming hurricane, Hurricane Mandy, I knew Dad was as good as dead. Mandy was the name of my mother, and also his least favorite sitcom character. I rushed down south to try and talk him into fleeing, but all of my attempts were futile.” His death is dumb and preventable, but that in no way lessens the intensity of the narrator’s grief. That stuck with me. If the joke’s on him, she seems to say, then it’s also on all of us. Sometimes it’s just not possible to make sense of the wild and terrifying forces swirling all around us. It’s as true of hurricanes as it is of love. 

Judge's comments: This reversal of the abecedarian form combines photography with finely observed aphoristic prose. Cleared eyed in its account of gender-based violence, deeply eloquent, and gracefully strategized, this series of reflections is the work of a writer resourceful enough to find a new language between word and image to meet the impossibilities of contemporary life.

Judge's comments:  “The Observer” takes a multi-disciplinary approach to a highly imaginative landscape. The writing lures the reader into a world where nothing is familiar and yet underlying everything is an attention to small moments and inter-being fragments. Wonderful writing that pushes the boundary of imagination.

Judge's comments: This beguiling and endlessly quotable story focuses on a “shitty farmer” in Iowa named Slaughterhouse and her entanglement with her dog (“Dog”) and her OnlyFans Content Creator girlfriend (“Jane Doe”). The language is constantly surprising, impish, and full of echoes: “It was a day so beautiful it could be named Jane Doe.” Or: “Most days, Slaughterhouse felt like a dogfish. She was weak-jawed, five-foot-ten-inches, and the only thing that ever liked her right away was dogs. She hunched her shoulders when she walked, like she might swallow a cloud on accident, or press a hand against the sun like it was a stovetop burner.” Underlying the language is a sense of grief that bursts to the surface by the end.

Judge's comments: With its dramatic unfurling sentences, "Deer Season" beautifully captures the human-animal interface--alternately entering the perspective of a doe with her two fawns and a woman who has lost her ex-husband to a car-crash. The writing is hauntingly estranged and kinetic when it follows the deer (“for there are dangers the fawns still do not know, such as the passage across the hardest ground, where the humans bring all their sound and light”) and urgently realist when it traces the woman's reactions. Overall, this is a superb meditation on life cycles, as evidenced by these lines: “A deer’s life takes a predictable motion, a cyclical gesture of feeding and rest that never really ends. It is the shock of disruption that catches the deer in time, the pause of the day like a second-hand trapped to repeat the same count again and again.”

Judge's comments: In this delightful and touching story, a woman in an unsatisfying relationship dreams of Amelia Earhart but instead finds herself turned into—a worm! (“I narrow my worm-eyebrows at him,” goes one comic line). The storytelling proceeds with the deadpan tone of a Kafka fable till its violent, surprising, and gorgeous ending.

Judge's comments: Jenny Hu’s “Baby” is a house built of such tightly lain narrative bricks, the final structure stands solid in the reader’s very soul. A short story about a young woman named Rosie, who is dealing in layers of family and relational secrets, “Baby” offers us the brilliant trick of having us know all the things the characters don’t. “I could shatter the perfect pretense,” Rosie says of her mother, “the blissful rotten oblivion with which she paints her lashes and pours her tea and cooks our lavish meals,” and we know that the primary secret of this story is that most terrible of truths, that love is a fluidly imperfect, oft-mangled medium.

Judge's comments: “Deer Season," which immerses the reader in "the rhythms of deer life," is a triumph of empathy and noticing. The electric, circling prose mimics the consciousness of a doe and her fawns, drawing us slantwise into the story of a woman named Marla whose ex-husband has perished in a car-crash. The two strands come together in a devastating conclusion that makes us reconsider much of what has come before.  

Judge's comments: Gabriella Wrighten’s “New Age Romance” is an experiment gone right, a story anchored by the diary entries that catalogue Jasmine’s annual birthday present haul from age seven to twenty-five. The meat of story that surrounds this backbone is rich with the loss and love that is both common to this stage of life and unique to Jasmine’s. “With a pen in her hand, [Jasmine] felt she controlled all the ends of time,” Wrighten writes, and readers will feel this story accomplish just such magic.

Judge's comments: “A Home for a Hermit” unfolds as a story of a budding cross-species friendship. Herman, a hermit crab, leaves an ocean home to investigate the sand and shore where the crab makes the acquaintance of a boy who takes an interest in the wee crustacean. The crab-boy friendship grows over the course of the afternoon but is eventually interrupted (the boy is called by his mother to head home for the day). After an interval of a few days, the crab and boy are reunited -- this time as the day rounds out with the crab being brought home. The warm-hearted and jovial story, accompanied by lively drawings, addresses everyone's need to connect -- as important for crabs as it is for little boys -- and explores the value of pursuing joy and friendship...and wonder. 

Judge's comments: There is unquestionable promise and accomplishment in this suite of poems, so much so that I expect to see this work published successfully.  The work has a gravitas of consideration that lends is themes and treatment a sense of importance.  The poet’s sense of place and occasion are strongly evoked—the domestic labor of hairdo, the anxiety about acts of resistance and acts of vanishing.  This is good work.

Judge's comments: These poems call on us to ask their title's question and do so with a careful, deep, located personalism. They bring us, precisely, to understand, and to begin to ask. They take us to particular moments and different stages of a young life by evoking poetic detail – “his eyebrow raising like a broken pencil” – and by placing such details in the shared time of transformative human relations – “We’d hold / hands, our thumbs brushing together, and watch / older couples doing the same.” The poems’ images seem simple, just as they are re-imagined, but also often moist and visceral as their question demands.

Judge's comments: Sloan Asakura’s Window removes the blinds and allows the reader to see straight through without shade, opening into the tough expanse of a familial life that swirls with history, story, pain, and contradiction. Window stacks vignettes that culminate into a tapestry that illuminates the ways family can sometimes save and sometimes harm us. 

Judge's comments: “White Light in the Window” thoughtfully captures the vivid aliveness of aging, the quiet, expansive ripples that emerge through living adjacent to mortality. With exquisite sensitivity to sensory details – light, sound, and textures of air – an intimate third-person narrator contemplates the long durée of grieving a long-haul love, while finding community in the language of Little Guyana in Queens, NY: “It’s a fascinating thing, watching your tongue fall out of a stranger’s mouth.” With softly wielded feminist critique, definitions of family are loosened by necessity. The reader is called in to witness a daily existence that might easily go unnoticed – here, each moment is beautifully refracted through the finely-tuned lines of this shimmering prose.

“CANINE PERRA BADDIE” is a lot. A lot of viscera, cacophony, grief, detritus, punk-collage. The energy is poetic brinksmanship crossed with intergenerational grief. You can’t craft your way into this level of furious embodiment, as the writer commands: “You will move through my banshee ways.” This loud collection houses a chorus of wild tongues, tongues descended from that of Gloria Anzaldúa, here in the form of a profane, bilingual, inchoate mob-chorus, bridging across family to community: “Bring us poems that ask a neighborhood what they need.” The threnody below – what rises above the din – the message – is love.

Shefali Trivedi’s American August is a slow and building narrative that engages memory, struggle, and the lingering interior reflections that shape what can sometimes feel like a stagnant life. At the center of this story is neither great revelation, nor transformative change, but rather an intricately layered look at a slice of Americana that we do not often see represented in literature. Trivedi’s characters are neither hero nor villain, but ordinary people moving through their circumstances with a desire to feel something more than what they have been handed.

Judge's comments: “Dangling Man” by way of Nigeria, “Unending Days in Limbo” focuses on Ola, who is endlessly frustrated in his quest to become a doctor—which anyway is not his own desire, but “a dream sold to him by a crafty salesman”—his father. The magic of the story lies in its ability to make Ola’s forced break from college (due to a strike) feel dynamic and meaningful, even as the days pile on (One section is titled “Day 230”). Much of this is achieved through Akanbi’s deft evocation of a community and his sure sense of language: “Here he gets a bird-view of rot and flourish separated by a natural boundary that makes it seem God approves of this dichotomy.”

Judge's comments: “Dinner in the Country” is a disquieting tale that brings to mind WG Sebald’s "Austerlitz."  In a restaurant, the narrator meets a stranger —"a painter and sculptor from Zimbabwe who at some point in the last 10 years had stopped painting and sculpting and begun instead to devise performances and strange little films." He proceeds to hear the stranger's tale. Underneath the formality and patience of the prose is a furious sense of unease and displacement: “What I can say now is that he was not trying to swallow anything but instead trying to expel something that had tunneled deep within him, something that bothered him terribly and something he one day hoped to be free of again.” Great attention is paid to small gestures: “His bouncing knee, which caused the drop of the sheer-white tablecloth to ever so softly ripple, became the only indication to me that he was still conscious.” The story opens into a sharp meditation on the psychological toll of colonialism.

Judge's comments: With one of the three works included making explicit reference to Frank O’Hara, these poems concede very little ground to writing of such caliber and sophistication. The rhythms are relaxed and conversational, never faltering, and there’s quiet, sharp-eyed wit, that refrains from show-stopping interruption and simply delivers believable insights into the relationship that the poet addresses, translating, for striking example, the compromising intimacy of McCarthy and Cohn (!) into the lover's kisses that are “more like theirs than Klimt’s” – in the opinion of the beloved. [I won’t forget that image!] And even when the depravities of the first poem and the complexities of the O’Hara homage are followed by a self-reflection on the beloved’s approach to reading the lover's “poem on a bus,” this leads to a non-cliché “wondering what kind of poems you’d write about me / if I’d known you that young.” At 14, before the beloved gave up on poetry. Great stuff.

Judge's comments: This is an extract from a long poem, “Parataxes” filled with intimate moments of thought and feeling, but mostly what recommends this piece is the detail—the way that food, and the body, and the dynamic strain of relationships are all captured. The piece does not hold itself together by form, but by a collage-like series of slippages of ideas.  In a sense we have seen these formal acts before, but what stands out is the freshness of sentiment.  The passage on cooking is especially original and beautiful. 

Judge's comments:  Wilson Roe came in with an idea for a half hour show about a gay teen boy managing his sexuality in a highly religious environment. He had a vague idea of how to write a tv show and had a very funny and imaginative first draft but as he learned more he realized that tv writing is more challenging than it seems. He often marveled that writing took as much mental energy, if not more, than the work he was doing in his economics classes. By the end of the semester, he had a funny, original and beautifully written pilot. 

As part of the writing process, I recommended he watch the British tv show "Sex Education" for the world of high school teens dealing with sex and sexuality and Bridget Everett's show "Somebody, Somewhere," for its original and moving portrayal of a religious gay man.  Wilson spent his vacation watching every episode of both shows and realized along the way that "Sex Education" best reflected his sensibility and could serve as inspiration for his own ideas. 

At first, Wilson wanted the character to be Catholic but when I asked if Wilson himself was Catholic and he said no, I suggested he consider something closer to home. This began a vibrant dialogue between us about his personal experience growing up in a small Texas town surrounded by Southern Baptist Christians with strong views against homosexuality. Part of the lesson here was understanding how to write something personal that is not necessarily autobiographical and how to use the specificity of one's lived experience as material for one's work. It required that Wilson spend a considerable amount of time simply thinking about his point of view and what he wanted to say in his script. The thinking was as important as the actual writing and he took it very seriously. He showed up at each of our meetings with new, original thoughts and well considered opinions about what he wanted to do. 

In each iteration of the script, Wilson metabolized my notes and his writing grew in skill and confidence. Many of his lessons were technical in nature. How does a half hour comedy work? What is the act structure? How do you tie up all loose threads that you've woven in from the first page? The biggest challenge for first time pilot writers is understanding that they are writing a series not one self-contained episode. Wilson caught on quickly that he had to set up the world and the characters but also leave the audience wanting more at the end of the script -- oftentimes, it's episode two that's more important than the first episode and we talked at length about what that episode two might be based on what he set up in the pilot. Wilson took all recommendations, spread his wings and flew. He nailed so many issues the first time around that I didn't have to do more than help him polish his final draft. 

Wilson is blessed with a natural and easy sense of humor which was expressed organically in the pilot prompting me to laugh out loud at some of his scenes. He is also a close listener, able to distinguish his characters through dialogue, speech patterns and verbal emphasis which made all his dialogue funny, idiosyncratic and utterly authentic. As Wilson dug deeper into the world he knows from his upbringing, the richer his work. It became more insightful, more comedic, more meaningful with each draft. His final pass is a master class in pilot writing - succinct, funny, smart and with exactly the right tension to get an audience to watch the rest of the show to see what happens. Wilson is a wonderful writer and his thesis project exemplified the very best of what students can do when they are not just talented (which he is) but motivated to learn and grow. I enthusiastically recommend Wilson Roe receive the Levin-Hokin Premium for Excellence in Filmmaking and Screenwriting.

Sam Schwartz is a gifted writer, and through five semesters of working with him, I’ve come to understand that he is an extremely passionate learner and deep thinker in a variety of subjects. He completed an honors thesis in History and also in Slavic Studies. But what to do with all the telling minor details of human behavior that came up in his research, specifically about Stalin and those around him during his Great Purge? Sam’s answer was to take on a third honors thesis in Literary Arts, What Do You Die With?, a poetic, rigorously researched, and sometimes hilarious 5-chapter radio play. The story weaves together gem-like historical details, elucidating and skewering the tragic obsessions, paranoia, absurdity and dehumanization common in dictatorships.

What Do You Die With? centers on the final months of Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Bolshevik, Soviet politician and theorist. Once part of Stalin’s innermost circle, he is imprisoned for treason during the purge, and writes dozens of letters from his prison cell, professing “boundless love” for Stalin and the Revolutionary Cause, and ultimately begging for a cup of poison rather than the firing squad. Stalin doesn’t answer the letters, but “mocks them and marks them with his little blue pencil before circulating them amongst his friends for comment.”

Sam’s 47-minute radio play, paced like a thriller, is an immersive window into Bukharin’s quiet despair and reckoning. It includes a world-weary but rapid-fire narrator; excerpts from Sam’s own translations of Bukharin’s letters; a scene from a reported dream conversation between Bukharin and Stalin’s dead (by suicide) wife; and conversations between Bukharin’s buffoonish executioners. Especially striking are Sam’s rich poetic prose, packed with imagery and vivid language, and his sophisticated gallows humor, which playfully veers between lowbrow and high. 

Sam skillfully performs the narration; and he perfectly attuned the other excellent voice actors to his tragicomic sensibility. Although he invented the dialogue and narration, Sam says he took minimal creative liberties with the historical facts that drive his story. This is both surprising and not surprising, as many of the human foibles and failings he lays bare, and the narrator’s shipwreck-themed imagery, resonate with our present reality. I highly recommend giving What Do You Die With? a listen. It won’t make you less worried, but its brilliant, entertaining and edifying qualities can bring comfort.

I most highly recommend Sam to receive the Levin-Hokin Premium for Excellence in Filmmaking and Screenwriting.

Judge's comments: "My Right to Abstraction" provides an ambitious and focused attention on the reverberations of artmaking through both personal and social accounts. Using an extended form of ekphrasis, the piece both celebrates and criticizes. The language is both highly poetic and yet in startling moments provocatively direct.

Judge's comments: At once surreal and keenly observed, Cordoba’s vignettes of familial hell reconfigure lyricism and narrative to produce a story-form all their own. This beautifully rendered and terrifying account of contemporary adolescence ponders the mutation of myth in a country where fantasy has become illegal -- and where pleasure is always someone else’s smile.