prize winning essays in english

Past Winning Essays

2023 winning essay by jeremy haynes, 2022 winning essay by theodora mcgee, 2021 winning essay by anna dougherty, 2020 winning essay by noah durham, 2019 winning essay by elazar cramer, 2018 winning essay by jeffrey seaman, 2017 winning essay by daud shad, 2016 winning essay by zhen tu, 2015 winning essay by matthew waltman, 2014 winning essay by ben wolman, 2013 winning essay by jamie baer, 2012 winning essay by patrick reilly, 2011 winning essay by kevin kay, 2010 winning essay by michael reed, 2009 winning essay by margo balboni, 2008 winning essay by laura schapiro, 2007 winning essay by maia gottlieb, 2006 winning essay by ben loffredo, 2005 winning essay by allie comet, 2005 winning essay by kevin zhou, 2004 winning essay by avram sand, 2004 winning essay by will schmidley, 2003 winning essay by michael sloyer, 2002 winning essay by emily ullman, 2001 winning essay by tyler boersen, 2001 winning essay by stephanie dziczek, 2000 winning essay by peter buttigieg.

PWR Boothe Prize Essay Archive

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Boothe Prize essays for 2023-2024

The 2023-2024 Boothe Prize book will be available in summer 2024.

PWR Winners for 2023-2024

• Miriam Awan (Winner, Spring 2023). “Gender Panic: How the Mainstream News Media Legitimizes Anti-Transgender Political Rhetoric.” Instructor: Chris Kamrath. 
• Zoe Colloredo-Mansfeld (Honorable Mention, Spring 2023). “The Transformational Moves of Art: Exploding Landscapes, Geographies, and Histories Toward Liberation.” Instructor: Selby Wynn Schwartz.

Boothe Prize essays for 2022-2023

The 2022-2023 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF  here .

PWR Winners for 2022-2023

• Sejoon Chang (Winner, Spring 2022). " Sweet, Sour, and Umami: The Socioeconomics of Pad Thai and Thailand's State-Sponsored Gastrodiplomacy. ” Instructor: Julia Schulte.
• Aya Hilal (Honorable Mention, Spring 2022). “ Palestinian Disability: Ableism and Israel’s Settler-Colonial Strategy. ” Instructor: Lindsey Felt.
• Caeley Woo (Winner, Fall 2022). " Bridging the Divide: Narrative as a Means to Create Empathy in Sexual Assault Cases. " Instructor: Becky Richardson.
• Jaeden Solomon Clark. (Honorable Mention, Fall 2022). “ From the Body, to the Mind, to the Soul: The Dialectical Disfigurement of the Self Colonialism through Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). ”  Instructor: Mutallip Anwar.
• Zoya Fasihuddin (Winner, Winter 2023). " Did My School Colonize Me? ” Instructor: Lynn Sokei.  
• Hanyi Chen (Honorable Mention, Winter 2023) “ Female Despair, Family Taboo, and Social Shackle: A Glimpse Into the Impact of Chinese Birth Control Policies on Gender Roles Perspectives Through the Stories of Three Generations of Chinese Women. ” Instructor: Mutallip Anwar.

Boothe Prize essays for 2021-2022

The 2021-2022 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2021-2022

• Angélique Charles-Davis (Winner, Spring/Summer 2021). “ America’s Broken Promise: Examining Black Racial Identity in the School Choice Binary. " Instructor: Lisa Swan.
• Jade Araujo (Honorable Mention, Spring/Summer 2021). " A Legacy of Safety: Comprehensive Policy for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. " Instructor: Roberta Wolfson.
• Sofia Gonzalez-Rodriquez (Winner, Fall 2021). " Cuando Colón baje el dedo. " Instructor: Daniel Bush. 
• Parker Kasiewicz (Honorable Mention, Fall 2021). " Automate Checkmate: The Case for Creativity in Computer Chess. " Instructor: Shay Brawn.
• Winner: Zarif Ahsan (Winner, Winter 2022). “ An Archive of Half-Silence: Incorporating Female Sexual Violence Narratives into Public Histories of the 1971 Bangladeshi Genocide. ” Instructor: Efrain Brito.
• Cassidy Dalva (Honorable Mention, Winter 2022). " Syncretism or Disappearance? Understanding the Acculturation of Sephardic Jews. ” Instructor; Sangeeta Mediratta.

Boothe Prize essays for 2020-2021

The 2020-2021 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF and as an eBook .

PWR Winners for 2020-2021

• Ciara Locker (Winner, Spring 2020). " Building Biosecurity: Examining the Rhetoric of Bioterrorism in Post-9/11 America. " Instructor: Mutallip Anwar.
• Abigal Van Neely (Honorable Mention, Spring 2020).  " The Pedagogy of Values: The Role of Culture and Experience in Education Inequity ." Instructor: Lisa Swan.
• Anonymous. (Winner, Fall 2020). " When Never Again' Becomes 'Yet Again': Advocating for International Cooperation and Multilaterialism to End the Uyghur Genocide ." Instructor: Mutallip Anwar.
• Cole Lee (Honorable Mention, Fall 2020). " Freedom within Bounds: How is Cultural Production Reshaped on Tiktok? " Instructor: Harriett Jernigan.
• Rachel Clinton (Winner, Winter 2021). " Diversity and Exclusion: Exploring the HIgher Education Success Gap between U.S.-Origin and Immigrant-Origin Black Students. " Instructor: Lisa Swan.
• Mia Cano (Honorable Mention, Winter 2021). " Pipe Dreams: A Critical Evaluation of the STEM Pipeline Metaphor ." Instructor: Lisa Swan.

Prize essays for 2019-2020

The 2019-2020 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2019-2020

• Cole Maxwell (Winner, Spring 2019). " Mrs. Stanford in the Nile: The Legacy of the Stanford Family's Collection Practices in Egypt at the Turn of the 20th Century. " Instructor: Gigi Otalvaro.
• Caroline Utz (Honorable Mention, Spring 2019). " Dove, Real Beauty, and Pseudo Social Change: The Consumption, Commodification, and Commercialization of the Body Positive Movement. " Instructor: Yanshuo Zhang.
• Malavika Kannan (Winner, Fall 2019). " Targeting a Generation: How Intersectional Youth Outreach Can Overcome America's Gun Divide. " Instructor: Jennifer Johnson.
• Langston Nashold (Honorable Mention, Fall 2019). " A Climate of Denial: The Cause of and Solution to Republican Skepticism of Climate Science. " Instructor: Mutallip Anwar.
• Madeleine Parker Cassic (Winner, Winter 2020). " The Battle for Public Education. " Instructor: Lisa Swan.
• Ana Ximena Sosa (Honorable Mention, Winter 2020). " Tren Maya: Trail of the Cultures. " Instructor: Irena Yamboliev.

Prize essays for 2018-2019

The 2018-2019 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2018-19

• Esther Omole (Winner, Spring 2018): " Medical Trauma and the Black Female Body: Enacting Clinical Justice for African American Female Victims of Sexual Assault " Instructor: Sarah Peterson Pittock
• Shikha Srinivas (Honorable Mention, Spring 2018): " (Un)settled: Displacement in the Syrian Refugee Crisis and the Social Model of Disability " Instructor: Lindsey D. Felt
• Jackson Parell (Winner, Fall 2018): " Free at Last, Free at Last: Civil War Memory and Civil Rights Rhetoric " Instructor: Andy Hammann
• Ethan A. Chi (Honorable Mention, Fall 2018): " Singlish: Language, Power, and Identity in a Post-Colonial World " Instructor: Jennifer Johnson
• Sierra Wells (Winner, Winter 2019): " De Paisano a Paisano: What a Legendary Mexican Band Has to Say About the Lives of Its Listeners and Why It Matters " Instructor: Sarah Perkins
• Nadav Ziv (Honorable Mention, Winter 2019): " Never Again Means Never Forgetting: The Shoah in Polish Society and Education " Instructor: Samah Elbelazi

Prize essays for 2017-2018

The 2017-2018 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2017-18

• Alexis Lefft (Winner, Spring 2017): " 'If Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings:' Kehinde Wiley's Lamentation as Ontological Resurrection " Instructor: Jamie O'Keeffe
• Jasmine Liu (Honorable Mention, Spring 2017): " From E Pluribus Unum to E Pluribus Plures: Examining Assimilationist and Nationalist Narratives in American History Textbooks " Instructor: John Peterson
• Sydney Westley (Winner, Fall 2017): " Conversing with Silence: Destabilizing Understandings of the Linguistic Reverberations of the Japanese Internment Camps " Instructor: Tesla Schaeffer
• Lucas Sato (Honorable Mention, Fall 2017): " Not with a Bang but a Computer: An Investigation in Promoting Safe AI Research Based on Lessons Learned from the History of Nuclear Technology Development " Instructor: Jennifer Johnson
• Roxy Bonafont (Winner, Winter 2018): " Push Factors: The Complicity of Traditional News Organizations in the Age of Ambient Media " Instructor: Chris Kamrath
• Rishabh Kapoor (Honorable Mention, Winter 2018): " 'For My Old Kentucky Home, Far Away:' A Case for the Psycho-Sociological Dimension of Rural Brain Drain " Instructor: Lisa Swan

Prize essays for 2016-2017

The 2016-2017 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2016-17

• Julia Sakowitz (Winner, Spring 2016): " 'We're A Lot More Than Gospel Singing:' Small Tourism Businesses in Harlem and Policy Proposals for the UMEZ. " Instructor: Irena Yamboliev
• Alex Maben (Honorable Mention, Spring 2016): " Crafting CRISPR Fantasies: Flaws in Current Metaphors of Gene-Modifying Technology. " Instructor: Jennifer Johnson
• Xinlan Emily Hu (Winner, Fall 2016): " Endangered Languages: Rescuing the World's Invisible Libraries. " Instructor: Irena Yamboliev
• Vienna G. Kuhn (Honorable Mention, Fall 2016): " Fighting for Choice. " Instructor: Lindsey Felt
• Nicholas Branigan (Winner, Winter 2017): " Michelle K. Lee v. Simon Shiao Tam. " Instructor: Paul Bator
• Veronica Kim (Honorable Mention, Winter 2017): " 'It's My Mom's Recipe, and She Got It From a Video: How Food Videos are Changing Home Cooking Culture " Instructor: Brian Kim

Prize essays for 2015-2016

The 2015-2016 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2015-16

• John Sholar (Winner, Spring 2015): " Bitcoin as Currency and Catalyst or Why Bitcoin Will Fail, Why You Shouldn’t Care, and What We’re Missing " Instructor: Eric  vandal  Bussche
• Eleonora Pinto (Honorable Mention, Spring 2015) :  “ Demythologizing the TransMilenio: Why the Bus Rapid Transit System in Bogotá, Colombia has Underserved the Urban Poor ” Instructor: Luke Parker
• Ho Kyung Sung (Winner, Fall 2015): “ Declaring Amnesty on Prostitution: A Marxist Feminist Defense of Amnesty International’s Call for Decriminalization of Sex Work ” Instructor: Ben Wiebracht
• Wyatt Mullen (Honorable Mention, Fall 2015): “ Imagining the Infinite: The Evolution of Space in the American Visual Imagination ” Instructor: Meg Formato
• Joan Creus-Costa (Winner, Winter 2016): “ Beating a Dead-And-Alive Cat: Perspectives of Quantum Mechanics in Popular Science ” Instructor: Jennifer Johnson

Claudia Hanley (Honorable Mention, Winter 2016): “ Eight Hands Up: Re-Evaluating the Meritocratic Nature of College Admissions ” Instructor: Becky Richardson

Prize essays for 2014-2015

The 2014-2015 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2014-15

• Gloria Chua (Winner, Spring 2014): " Salvaging the Self: The Selfie’s Reclamation of the Unified Self in a Postmodern World " Instructor: Wendy Goldberg
• Diego Hernandez (Honorable Mention, Spring 2014): " Humanization and Dialogue in El Sistema and American Adaptations: Socially Minded Music Education through a Freirian Lens " Instructor: Hillary Miller
• Victoria White (Winner, Fall 2014): " Changing the Brothers: Constructions of Masculinity, Sexual Assault, and How to Fix the Frats " Instructor: Karli Cerankowski
• Grace Klein (Honorable Mention, Fall 2014): " Queer Christina of Sweden: How Evolving Accounts of a Long Dead Queen’s Sexuality Reflect More Upon Us Than He "  Instructor: Robert Stephan
• Elisa Vidales (Winner, Winter 2015): " Time to Welcome Chaos: The Intersection of the Trickster, Creativity, and the Math Classroom "  Instructor: Hillary Miller
• Antariksh Mahajan (Honorable Mention, Winter 2015): " The Emergence of Konfrontasi in Singapore’s National Narrative " Instructor: Magdalena H. Gross

Prize essays for 2013-2014

The 2013-2014 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2013-14

• Brian Do (Winner, Spring 2013): " Immediate Healthcare Interventions: A Path to Prosperity in Sub-Saharan Africa "  Instructor: Jennifer Stonaker
• Brian Hie (Honorable Mention, Spring 2013): " Gene Transfer to Remix: A Search for Copyright Reform in a Digital World "  Instructor: Chris Gerben
• Ruizhe (Thomas) Zhao (Winner, Fall 2013): " Word for Word: Culture's Impact on the Localization of Japanese Video Games "  Instructor: Christine Alfano
• Virginia Rose La Puma (Winner, Winter 2014): " On the Brain and Accountability: The Role of the Neuroscience in the Courtroom "  Instructor: Kathleen Tarr
• Sam Kurland (Honorable Mention, Winter 2014): " "Red Lines" and the Syrian Civil War: The Power of a President "  Instructor: John Lee

Boothe Prize essays for 2012-2013

The 2012-2013 Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF .

PWR Winners for 2012-13

• Kirstin Wagner (Winner, Spring 2012): " Managing the Mean Girl:  California's Incomplete State Policy on Social Aggression " Instructor: Sarah Peterson Pittock
• Charlotte Geaghan-Breiner (Honorable Mention, Spring 2012): " Where the Wild Things Should Be:  Healing Nature Deficit Disorder through the Schoolyard " Instructor: Sarah Peterson Pittock
• Kat Gregory (Winner, Fall 2012): " Wanted in Every Sense of the Word:  Deconstructing the Romanticized Outlaw Hero " Instructor: Donna Hunter
• Kaitlyn Williams (Honorable Mention, Fall 2012): " When Gaming Goes Bad:  An Exploration of Videogame Harassment Towards Female Gamers " Instructor: Christine Alfano
• Amy Bearman (Winner, Winter 2013): " The Soul of a New Machine: The Social Psychological Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction " Instructor: Ryan Zurowski
• Ansh Shukla (Honorable Mention, Winter 2013): " The Four-Year Plan: A Reframing of Contemporary Debate Regarding the "Death" of American Undergraduate Liberal Education " Instructor: Mark Taylor

Boothe Prize essays for 2011-2012

Pwr winners for 2011-2012.

• Tina Roh (Winner, Spring 2011): " Gaming Through Glitches: How Glitches Open New Experiences to Players "  Instructor: Christine Alfano
• Kima Uche (Kevin U. Imah) (Honorable Mention, Spring 2011): " Yaoi and Male Homosexuality in Modern Japan: Identity, Divergence, and Discourse " Instructor:  Rhiannon Lewis
• Adam Perelman (Winner, Fall 2011): " Child's Play: Historical Agency and the New York City Playground Movement "  Instructor: Sarah Pittock
• Emma Dohner (Honorable Mention, Fall 2011): " Putting a Price on Nature " Instructor: Erik Ellis
• Jake Sonnenberg (Winner, Spring 2012): " Legend and Legacy: A Rhetorical History of Lewis and Clark " Instructor: Gabrielle Moyer
• Oriekose Idah (Honorable Mention, Spring 2012): " BB Me Najia: The 'Forgotten Nigerian Man' and the Blackberry Phone " Instructor: Sohui Lee

Boothe Prize essays for 2010-2011

The 2010-2011 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2010-2011

• Clarice Nguyen (Winner, Spring 2010): “ Advertising Antidepressants: The Rhetoric of Pharmaceutical Marketing ”
• David Wu (Honorable Mention, Spring 2010): “ Virtual Property or Virtual Service? ”
• Patricia Ho (Winner, Fall 2010): “ Citizen Journalism: Locally Grown, Community-Owned ”
• Tonya Yu (Honorable Mention, Fall 2010): " One Laptop per Child: A Need to Help Teachers Help Students "
• Gillie Collins (Winner, Winter 2011): “ The Neo-Taliban’s Neo-History: Re-Cognition and Resurgence ”
• Kurt Chirbas (Honorable Mention, Winter 2011): “ The Social Divide: David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin as Counterpoints in the Dialogue over the Internet ”

IHUM Winners for 2010-2011

• Jake Zeller (Winner, Spring 2010): “ The Idol of Prescriptive Normativity "
• Lucy Richards (Honorable Mention, Spring 2010): “ The Importance of Developing a More Inclusive Role for Archeology in Jerusalem and Ayodhya "
• Kristian Davis Bailey (Winner, Fall 2010): “ Empathy vs. Emptiness: An Investigation of Human and Divine Responses to Pain ”
• Tyler Haddow (Honorable Mention, Fall 2010): “ Art as the Key to an Intellectual Conscience ”
• Tiffany Dharma ( Winner, Winter 2011): “ And Then There Was Money: The Godliness and Godlessness of Acquisitive Economy ”
• Maya Krishnan (Winner, Winter 2011): “ Launch out on the story, Muse ”
• Gabriele Carotti-Sha (Honorable Mention, Winter 2011): “ Caught in the Causal Net: A Reflection on Fichte’s Lecture on Man’s Vocation in Society ”

Boothe Prize essays for 2009-2010

The 2009-2010 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2009-2010

• Fannie Watkinson (Spring 2009 Winner): " The Role of Aesthetics: Green Skyscrapers in the 21st Century "
• Karen Shen (Fall 2009 Winner): " The Paradox of Public Support for 'Quality-of-Life' Policing "
• Lauren YoungSmith (Fall 2009 Honorable Mention): " Communication Beyond Loss: Lorca's Triangular Rhetoric "
• Kris Sankaran (Winter 2010 Winner): " Theater Between Borders: Navigating Cultures in an Interconnected World "
• Alex Ryan (Winter 2010 Honorable Mention): " MMORPGs: A Medium for Utopian and Experimental Genesis "

IHUM Winners for 2009-2010

• Fiona Hinze (Winner, Spring 2009): "An Encounter with Angel Island"
• Mia Newman (Honorable Mention, Spring 2009): "Under the Yoke: The Institution of Marriage in Middlemarch"
• Alex Hertz (Winner, Fall 2009): "A Challenging Invitation to Faith"
• Ben Pittenger (Honorable Mention, Fall 2009): "Trains, Pains, and Automobiles: The Liminal Trek beyond Survival in The Piano Lesson and Maus I"
• Kelly Vicars (Winner, Winter 2010): "Intertwining Art"
• Evan Storms (Honorable Mention, Winter 2010): "Antigone and the Social Contract Theory of the Crito"

Boothe Prize essays for 2008-2009

The 2008-2009 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2008-2009

• Anna Grummon (Winner, Spring 2008): " In Defense of Human Agency: Protection of Self-Image in the Milgram Obedience Experiments "
• Kyie Tuosto (Honorable Mention, Spring 2008): " The 'Grunt Truth' of Embedded Journalism "
• Jacob Stern (Winner, Fall 2008): " If You Give an Artist an Apron "
• Katherine Disenhof (Honorable Mention, Fall 2008): " Sweet Surprise: Visual Rhetoric and the Flawed Message of the Corn Refiners Association's Sweet Surprise Campaign "
• Rachel Kolb (Winner, Winter 2009): " A Journey into the Heart of Silence: The Rhetoric of Expression, Gesture, and Thought "
• Caitlin Colgrove (Honorable Mention, Winter 2009): " Fugue in A minor for Carbon and Silicon "

IHUM Winners for 2008-2009

• Sarrah Nomanbhoy (Winner, Spring 2008): "Embracing Ambiguity in 'Bartleby the Scrivener'"
• Nicole Gordon (Honorable Mention, Spring 2008): "When a Silent Killer Confronts a Silent Society: Stanford University's Response to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic from 1980-1989"
• Adam Adler (Winner, Fall 2008): "Wisconsin v. Yoder: Maximizing Religious Choice"
• Rachel Kolb (Winner, Winter 2009): "Thought Aids Acting, Not Action: Laurence Olivier's and Franco Zeffirelli's Versions of Hamlet"
• Jacob Vandermeer (Honorable Mention, Winter 2009): "Identity Manipulation in Candide andThe Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano as Model for the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World"

Boothe Prize essays for 2007-2008

The 2007-2008 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2007-2008

• Justin Solomon (Winner, Spring 2007): " Programmers, Professors, and Parasites: Credit and Co-Authorship in Computer Science "
• Keith Schwarz (Honorable Mention, Spring 2007): " Eminent Domain and Anti-Trust: A Proposal to Remedy Kelo's Excess "
• Sophie Theis (Winner, Fall 2007): " Imitation vs. Internationalization: The Rhetoric of Teen Travel-Program Advertising for College-Bound Youth "
• Dixon Bross (Honorable Mention, Fall 2007): " How Interesting: Interest and the Quotidian in Art Cinema "
• Eric Slessarev (Winner, Winter 2008): " Nature Takes New York: A Secret Rebellion "
• Sasha Engelmann (Honorable Mention, Winter 2008): " Breaking the Frame: Olaf Eliasson's Art, Merleu Ponty's Phenomenology, and the Rhetoric of Eco-Activism "

Boothe Prize essays for 2006-2007

The 2006-2007 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2006-2007

• Leslie Georgatos (Winner, Spring 2006): " Brand America: Exploring the Appropriate Role of Marketing Strategies in Public Diplomacy "
• Christine Chung (Honorable Mention, Spring 2006): "' Hello Kitty Noodles' and Ramen Culture in the 21st Century "
• Jessica Galant (Winner, Fall 2006): " Keeping Tableaux Vivants Alive "
• Anne Datesh (Honorable Mention, Fall 2006): "  The Decision to Drop the Bomb: Where Hindsight is Not 20/20 "
• Jocelyn Jiao (Winner, Winter 2007): " Madama Butterfly Gave Birth to a Monster: Exploring the Internalization of Racial Stereotypes within Asian American Women " 
• Annelise Blum (Honorable Mention, Winter 2007): " Hugo Chávez’s Debut: Rhetoric and Petro–Politics in the World Theater A Dramatic Essay in Three Acts "

Boothe Prize essays for 2005-2006

The 2005-2006 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2005-2006

• Kimber Lockhart (Winner, Spring 2005): " Women in Computer Science: A Skill-Specific Analysis "
• Nick Parker (Honorable Mention, Spring 2005): " The Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell: Mistakes Worth Fixing "
• Jennifer Chin (Winner, Fall 2005): " Reaffirming, Not Redefining: A Look at Rem Koolhass' New Seattle Central Library "
• Matthew Gribble (Honorable Mention, Fall 2005): " Gender, Art, and the Nursing Shortage: The Effect of Gendered Visual Rhetoric on the American Healthcare System "
• Cecilia Yang (Winner, Winter 2006): " The Memorial Hall for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre: Rhetoric in the Face of Tragedy "
• Aaron Quiggle (Honorable Mention, Winter 2006): " In Search of an Anorexic Rhetoric: A Theory of Language, Meaning, Society, and Mental Illness "

IHUM Winners for 2005-2006

• Jessica Lee (Winner, Spring 2005): "Death of the Faces of God"
• Julie Byren (Honorable Mention, Spring 2005): "If You're Lost Enough to Find Yourself: Unveiling Nature's Secrets in Robert Frost's 'October' and 'Directive'"
• Patrick Leahy (Winner, Fall 2005): "The Three Furies of Dublin"
• Nathan Pflueger (Honorable Mention, Fall 2005): "Hamlet's Imagined Filial Love"
• Sarah Johnson (Winner, Winter 2006): "Breaking the Watch Along With the Wedding Glass: Conceptions of Time in the Transition from Biblical to Rabbinic Judaism" 
• Jason Dunford (Honorable Mention, Winter 2006): "Empowering the Oppressed: The Role of Language in the Struggle Against Apartheid in South Africa"

Boothe Prize essays for 2004-2005

The 2004-2005 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2004-2005

• Ali Batouli (Winner, Spring 2004): “ The Free Internet: An Instrument of Control ”
• Shannon Donahue (Honorable Mention, Spring 2004): “ How Clean Are Green Ads? Evaluating Environmental Advertising in Contemporary Media ”
• Shivaram Lingamneni (Winner, Fall 2004): “ Predicting the Future of Internet Advertising ”
• Emily Dalton (Honorable Mention, Fall 2004): “ William Tyndale’s Biblical ‘Translation "
• Eyal Ophir (Winner, Winter 2005): “ Kick Ass Culture: Ads Mirror an Anti-Dialogue American Discourse ”
• Molly Cunningham (Honorable Mention, Winter 2005): “ Colonial Echoes in Kenyan Education: A First Person Account ”

IHUM Winners for 2004-2005

• Wendy Hagenmaier (Winner, Spring 2004): “‘To render it:’ Acts of Structural Passion in Levertov’s ‘An English Field in the Nuclear Age’.”
• Lia Hardin (Honorable Mention, Spring 2004): “Hear the Thunder: Isolation and Emotional Power in Kafka and Eliot.”
• Salvatore Bonaccorso (Winner, Fall 2004): “Self-Discovery through Language in Omeros andWalden.”
• Anne Wyman (Honorable Mention, Fall 2004): “Art Refracts Life.”
• Yun Chu (Winner, Winter 2005): “The Analysis of Rational Violence in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Goethe’s Faust across Three Mediums: Literature, Music, and Art.”
• Emily Dalton (Honorable Mention, Winter 2005): “Poetic Justice, Memory As A Moral Force."

Boothe Prize essays for 2003-2004

The 2003-2004 Boothe Prize book is available as a  PDF .

PWR Winners for 2003-2004

• Joshua Smith (Winner, Spring 2003), "Conflict Diamonds: Resolving Africa's Worst Resource Wars"
• Jennifer Cribbs (Honorable Mention, Spring 2003), "Darkness in the Vicious Kitchen: An Analysis of Feminist Themes and Suicidal Imagery in Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath's Poetry"
• Rui Xiong Kee (Winner, Fall 2003), "Exploring the 'Communist' in the Communist Insurrection in Malaya"
• Jasmine Hanifi (Honorable Mention, Fall 2003), "Belonging to America: Rhetoric of the Second Generation"
• Andrew Leifer (Winner, Winter 2004), "Harry Potter and the Battle of International Copyright Law"
• Hammad Ahmed (Honorable Mention, Winter 2004), "Grafting Cuba Onto the American Body Politic: The Intersection of Natural Science and Foreign Policy in the Annexationist Era"

IHUM Winners for 2003-2004

• Steph Abegg (Winner, Spring 2003), "Rome: The City of Gods"
• Gloria Nguyen (Honorable Mention, Spring 2003), "In Search of the Perfect Love"
• Anne Kalt (Winner, Fall 2003), "Perspectives on the Human Good"
• Bob Hough (Honorable Mention, Fall 2003), "Faith in Death"
• Patrick R. Callier (Winner, Winter 2004), "Matter, Systems, and Alternatives from the Americas by Borges"
• Annie Kalt (Honorable Mention, Winter 2004), "Male and Female Love Worlds: Inherently Separate Landscapes?"

Boothe Prize essays for 2002-2003

Pwr winners for 2002-2003.

• Mari Hayman (Winner, Spring 2002), “Adoption Issues in Latin America: Behind the Silence and the Secrets”
• Jennifer Kong (Honorable Mention, Spring 2002), “Fulfilling Stanford's Commitment to Diversity: Eliminating Gender Bias and Increasing the Number of Tenured Women Faculty”
• Prabhu Balasubramanian (Winner, Fall 2002), “Pharmaceutical Patents: Life Savers or Profit Makers?"
• Andre de Alencar Lyon (Honorable Mention, Fall 2002), “The Question of Textual Ideology in Changing Lanes”
• Eric Adamson (Winner, Winter 2003), “Malleability, Misrepresentation, Manipulation: The Rhetoric of Images in Economic Forecasting”
• David Craig (Honorable Mention, Winter 2003),“Instant Messaging: The Language of YouthLiteracy”

IHUM Winners for 2002-2003

• Heather MacKintosh Sims (Winner, Spring 2002), "Reflections of an Empire: The British Celts as Indicators of Roman Self-Perception"
• Jason Glick (Honorable Mention, Spring 2002), "Trading Land for Cultural Power: Anazaldua's and Cardenal's (Re)constructions of Mestiza Identity" 
• Andre de Alencar Lyon (Winner, Fall 2002), “Traversing the Gap Between Reality and the Individual in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse”
• Liang Dong (Honorable Mention, Fall 2002), “State and Empire: (De)Construction of the National Identity”
• Luke Lindley (Winner, Winter 2003), “A Heap of Broken Images: Conflicting Narratives of Nature in Milton's 'Lycidas'”
• Brian Caliando (Honorable Mention, Winter 2003) “Don't Spazz: It's Not Rational and It's Not Moral”

Boothe Prize essays for 2001-2002

• Boothe Prize essays for 2001-2002  (complete book - PDF)

Boothe Prize essays for 2000-2001

• Boothe Prize essays for 2000-2001  (complete book - PDF)

Winners of Chancellor's English Essay Prize 2022 Announced

We are delighted to announce that Francesca Gardner and George Adams have been named the joint winners of the Chancellor's English Essay Prize 2022. This year's subject was 'Light' and the two winning entries,  Making Light of Essays   (Francesca Gardner) and  Hail Holy Light, "Offspring of Heaven first-born"   (George Adams), are now available to read online.  

The Chancellor’s English Essay Prize is open to members of the University within four years of matriculation on the closing date for the receipt of submissions. Entries should not exceed 12,500 words in length.

How to Win Essay Contests: A Step-by-Step Guide

10 Steps to Writing Contest-Winning Essays

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Did you know that you can win prizes with your writing skills? Essay contests are a fun way to turn your creativity and your command of the written word into great prizes. But how do you give your essay the edge that gets it picked from among all of the other entries?

Here's a step-by-step guide to writing essays that impress judges. Follow these steps for your best chances of winning writing contests.

Read the Essay Contest Rules

The first thing that you should do to win essay contests is to read the rules thoroughly. Overlooking one small detail could be the difference between winning the contest and wasting your time.

Pay special attention to:

• The contest's start and end dates.
• How often you're allowed to enter.
• The word or character count .
• The contest's theme.
• The criteria that the judges will use to pick the winners.
• Who the sponsoring company is, and what their branding is like.
• And any other details the sponsor requires.

It might help you to print out the sweepstakes rules and highlight the most important elements, or to take notes and keep them close at hand as you write.

If you summarize the relevant rules in a checklist, you can easily check the requirements off when you've finished your essay to ensure you haven't overlooked anything.

Brainstorm Your Essay Ideas

Many people want to jump right into writing their essay, but it's a better idea to take some time to brainstorm different ideas before you start. Oftentimes, your first impulse isn't your best.

The Calgary Tutoring Centre lists several reasons why brainstorming improves your writing . According to their article, brainstorming lets you:

"Eliminate weaker ideas or make weaker ideas stronger. Select only the best and most relevant topics of discussion for your essay while eliminating off-topic ideas. Or, generate a new topic that you might have left out that fits with others."

For a great brainstorming session, find a distraction-free area and settle in with a pen and paper, or your favorite method to take notes. A warm beverage and a healthy snack might aid your process. Then, think about your topic and jot down quick words and phrases that are relevant to your theme.

This is not the time to polish your ideas or try to write them coherently. Just capture enough of the idea that you know what you meant when you review your notes.

Consider different ways that you can make the contest theme personal, come at it from a different angle, or stand out from the other contest entries. Can you make a serious theme funny? Can you make your ideas surprising and unexpected?

Write down all your ideas, but don't judge them yet. The more ideas you can come up with, the better.

Select the Essay Concept that Best Fits the Contest's Theme and Sponsor

Once you've finished brainstorming, look over all of your ideas to pick the one you want to develop for your essay contest entry.

While you're deciding, think about what might appeal to the essay contest's sponsor. Do you have a way of working the sponsor's products into your essay? Does your concept fit the sponsor's company image?

An essay that might be perfect for a Budweiser contest might fall completely flat when Disney is the sponsor.

This is also a good time to consider whether any of your rejected ideas would make good secondary themes for your essay.

Use a Good Hook to Grab the Reader's Attention

When it's time to start writing your essay, remember that the first sentence is the most important. You want to ensure that your first paragraph is memorable and grabs the reader's attention.

When you start with a powerful, intriguing, moving, or hilarious first sentence, you hook your readers' interest and stick out in their memory when it is time to pick winners.

Writer's Digest has some excellent tips on how to hook readers at the start of an essay in their article, 10 Ways to Hook Your Reader (and Reel Them in for Good) .

For ideas on how to make your essay unforgettable, see Red Mittens, Strong Hooks, and Other Ways to Make Your Essay Spectacular .

Write the First Draft of Your Essay

Now, it's time to get all of your thoughts down on paper (or on your computer). Remember that this is a first draft, so don't worry about perfect grammar or if you are running over your word count. 

Instead, focus on whether your essay is hitting the right emotional notes, how your story comes across, whether you are using the right voice, and if you are communicating everything you intend to.

First drafts are important because they help you overcome your reluctance to write. You are not trying to be good yet, you are trying to simply tell your story. Polishing that story will come later.

They also organize your writing. You can see where your ideas fit and where you need to restructure to give them more emotional impact.

Finally, a first draft helps you keep your ideas flowing without letting details slow you down. You can even skip over parts that you find challenging, leaving notes for your next revision. For example, you could jot down "add statistics" or "get a funny quote from Mom" and come back to those time-consuming points later.

Revise Your Essay for Flow and Organization

Once you've written the first draft of your essay, look over it to ensure that it flows. Is your point well-made and clear? Do your thoughts flow smoothly from one point to another? Do the transitions make sense? Does it sound good when you read it aloud?

This is also the time to cut out extraneous words and ensure you've come in under the word count limit.

Generally, cutting words will improve your writing. In his book, On Writing , Stephen King writes that he once received a rejection that read: "Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%." In other words, the first draft can always use some trimming to make the best parts shine.

If you'd like some tips on how to improve your first draft, check out these tips on how to self-edit .

Keep an Eye Out for "Red Mittens"

In her fantastic book, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio , Terry Ryan talked about how her mother Evelyn used "red mittens" to help her be more successful with contest entries.

As she put it:

"The purpose of the Red Mitten was almost self-explanatory -- it made an entry stand out from the rest. In a basket of mittens, a red one will be noticed."

Rhyme, alliteration, inner rhyme, puns, and coined words were some of the red mittens that Evelyn Ryan used to make her entries pop. Your essay's red mitten might be a clever play on words, a dash of humor, or a heart-tuggingly poignant story that sticks in the judges' minds.

If your first draft is feeling a little bland, consider whether you can add a red mitten to spice up your story.

Put Your Contest Entry Aside

Now that you have a fairly polished draft of your essay contest entry, put it aside and don't look at it for a little while. If you have time before the contest ends, put your essay away for at least a week and let your mind mull over the idea subconsciously for a little while.

Many times, people think of exactly what their essay needs to make it perfect... right after they have hit the submit button.

Letting your entry simmer in your mind for a while gives you the time to come up with these great ideas before it's too late.

Revise Your Essay Contest Entry Again

Now, it's time to put the final polish on your essay. Have you said everything you wanted to? Have you made your point? Does the essay sound good when you read it out loud? Can you tighten up the prose by making additional cuts in the word count?

In this phase, it helps to enlist the help of friends or family members. Read your essay to them and check their reactions. Did they smile at the right parts? Were they confused by anything? Did they connect with the idea behind the story?

This is also a good time to ensure you haven't made any grammar or spelling mistakes. A grammar checker like Grammarly is very helpful for catching those little mistakes your eyes gloss over. But since even computer programs make mistakes sometimes, so it's helpful to have another person — a good friend or family member — read it through before you submit it.

Read the Essay Contest Rules One Last Time

If you've been following these directions, you've already read through the contest rules carefully. But now that you've written your draft and had some time to think things over, read them through one more time to make sure you haven't overlooked anything.

Go through your checklist of the essay requirements point-by-point with your finished essay in front of you to make sure you've hit them all.

And now, you're done! Submit the essay to your contest, and keep your fingers crossed for the results !

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Regent’s Student Wins English Faculty Essay Prize

Date: 12/07/2021

Regent’s Park College student Jonathan Honnor (English Language and Literature, 2020) has been awarded the Faculty of English Chancellor’s English Essay Prize for his entry “‘The Loneliness One dare not sound’: When alienation becomes cliché”.  

The Chancellor’s English Essay Prize is open to members of the University who on the closing date for receipt of essays have matriculated less than four years ago. The subject of the essay for 2020/2021 was   “Cliché”.

Abstract of the prize-winning essay:

‘The essay begins with a discussion of Munch’s The Scream  and its reproductions in popular culture, and how such reproductions affect our viewing of the original. Munch’s painting is then compared with Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, and readings of Dickinson and Yeats, to show the tension that occurs when the language of an alienated poet enters popular use and idiom. It also considers the works of Joyce and Beckett as displaying literature’s inevitable tendency towards repetition and cliché. I find agreement with Pound that ‘beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another’, and conclude that, possibly, it is only in silence that the isolated individual can gain unique expression.’

For more information on the Faculty of English Prizes and Studentships visit the Faculty website here .

About Regent’s

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Best Essay Writing Contests in 2024

Showing 48 contests that match your search.

Climate Change Writing Competition

Write the World

Genres: Essay, Memoir, and Non-fiction

This month, dear writers, ahead of COP27, help us raise the voices of young people in this urgent fight. In a piece of personal narrative, tell the world’s leaders gathering in how climate change impacts you. How has this crisis changed your environment, your community, your sense of the future? Storytelling, after all, plays a critical role in helping us grasp the emergency through which we are all living, igniting empathy in readers and listeners—itself a precursor to action.

Additional prizes:

Runner-up: $50

📅 Deadline: October 18, 2022 (Expired)

Askew's Word on the Lake Writing Contest

Shuswap Association of Writers

Genres: Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, Essay, Memoir, and Short Story

Whether you’re an established or emerging writer, the Askew’s Word on the Lake Writing Contest has a place for you. Part of the Word on the Lake Writers’ Festival in Salmon Arm, BC, the contest is open to submissions in short fiction (up to 2,000 words), nonfiction (up to 2,000 words), and poetry (up to three one-page poems).

Publication

💰 Entry fee: $11

📅 Deadline: January 31, 2024 (Expired)

International Essay Competition 2023/24

Avernus Education

Genres: Essay

Welcome to our prestigious International Essay Competition. At Avernus Education, we are thrilled to provide a platform for young minds to showcase their prowess in Medicine, Engineering, Law, Economics, Psychology, History and Politics. These varied subject categories underscore the importance of interdisciplinary study, a crucial foundation for future leaders in our increasingly interconnected world. Winners receive an exclusive Avernus Education Scholarship worth over £5000 - granting them free entrance to our exclusive summer camp at Oxford University! Outstanding Runners Up receive 5 hours worth of Credits for Avernus Education courses, conferences and tutoring services.

100% Scholarship Award to our Oxford University Summer Programme (worth £5995)

Partial scholarship

📅 Deadline: February 19, 2024 (Expired)

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Plan, write, edit, and format your book in our free app made for authors.

Learn more about Reedsy Studio .

100 Word Writing Contest

Tadpole Press

Genres: Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Science Fiction, Science Writing, Thriller, Young Adult, Children's, Poetry, Romance, Short Story, Suspense, and Travel

Can you write a story using 100 words or less? Pieces will be judged on creativity, uniqueness, and how the story captures a new angle, breaks through stereotypes, and expands our beliefs about what's possible or unexpectedly delights us. In addition, we are looking for writing that is clever or unique, inspires us, and crafts a compelling and complete story. The first-place prize has doubled to $2,000 USD.

2nd: writing coach package

💰 Entry fee: $15

📅 Deadline: April 30, 2024

Indignor Play House Annual Short Story Competition

Indignor House Publishing

Genres: Fiction, Flash Fiction, Short Story, Crime, Essay, Fantasy, Horror, Humor, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Novella, Poetry, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller, and Young Adult

Indignor House Publishing is proud to announce that our annual writing competition (INDIGNOR PLAYHOUSE Short Story Annual Competition) is officially open with expected publication in the fall of 2024. Up to 25 submissions will be accepted for inclusion in the annual anthology.

2nd: $250 | 3rd: $150

💰 Entry fee: $20

📅 Deadline: March 01, 2024 (Expired)

Lazuli Literary Group Writing Contest

Lazuli Literary Group

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Poetry, Short Story, Flash Fiction, Non-fiction, Novella, and Script Writing

We are not concerned with genre distinctions. Send us the best you have; we want only for it to be thoughtful, intelligent, and beautiful. We want art that grows in complexity upon each visitation; we enjoy ornate, cerebral, and voluptuous phrases executed with thematic intent.

Publication in "AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought"

📅 Deadline: March 24, 2024 (Expired)

Rigel 2024: $500 for Prose, Poetry, Art, or Graphic Novel

Sunspot Literary Journal

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction, Novel, Novella, Poetry, Script Writing, and Short Story

Literary or genre works accepted. Winner receives $500 plus publication, while runners-up and finalists are offered publication. No restrictions on theme or category. Closes: February 29. Entry fee: $12.50. Enter as many times as you like through Submittable or Duotrope

$500 + publication

Runners-up and finalists are offered publication

💰 Entry fee: $12

📅 Deadline: February 29, 2024 (Expired)

Narratively 2023 Memoir Prize

Narratively

Genres: Essay, Humor, Memoir, and Non-fiction

Narratively is currently accepting submissions for their 2023 Memoir Prize. They are looking for revealing and emotional first-person nonfiction narratives from unique and overlooked points of view. The guest judge is New York Times bestselling memoirist Stephanie Land.

$1,000 and publication

📅 Deadline: November 30, 2023 (Expired)

African Diaspora Awards 2024

Kinsman Avenue Publishing, Inc

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, and Short Story

Up to $1000 in cash prizes for the African Diaspora Award 2024. African-themed prose and poetry wanted. Top finalists are published in Kinsman Quarterly’s magazine and the anthology, “Black Butterfly: Voices of the African Diaspora.”

Publication in anthology, "Black Butterfly: Voices of the African Diaspora" and print and digital magazine

💰 Entry fee: $25

📅 Deadline: June 30, 2024

Vocal Challenges

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction, and Short Story

Enter themed storytelling contests to put your creativity to the test and be in with a chance of winning cash prizes and more. To submit, you'll need to sign up for a monthly fee of $9.99, or $4.99/month for 3 months.

$1,000 — $5,000

📅 Deadline: March 07, 2024 (Expired)

Share Your Story

FanStory.com Inc.

Genres: Essay and Memoir

Write about an event in your life. Everyone has a memoir. Not an autobiography. Too much concern about fact and convention. A memoir gives us the ability to write about our life with the option to create and fabricate and to make sense of a life, or part of that life.

💰 Entry fee: $10

📅 Deadline: September 15, 2022 (Expired)

swamp pink Prizes

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry, and Short Story

From January 1st to January 31st, submit short stories and essays of up to 25 pages or a set of 1-3 poems. Winners in each genre will receive $2,000 and publication.

Stories of Inspiration

Genres: Essay and Non-fiction

Nonfiction stories of inspiration wanted (between 500 to 2,000 words). Submissions should highlight the struggle and resilience of the human spirit, especially related to cultures of BIPOC or marginalized communities. Stories must be original, unpublished works in English. One successful entry will be awarded each month from April 2024 and will be included within Kinsman Quarterly’s online journal and digital magazine. Successful authors receive $200 USD and publication in our digital magazine. No entry fee required.

Publication in Kinsman Quarterly's online magazine

📅 Deadline: December 31, 2024

Annual Student Essay Contest

Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum

For this year’s Essay Contest, we are asking students to think about why the story of the Oklahoma City bombing is important today.

📅 Deadline: March 04, 2024 (Expired)

A Very Short Story Contest

Gotham Writers Workshop

Genres: Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Humor, Memoir, and Non-fiction

Write a great short story in ten words or fewer. Submit it to our contest. Entry is free. Winner of the bet gets a free Gotham class.

Free writing class from Gotham Writers Workshop.

📅 Deadline: May 31, 2024

Aurora Polaris Creative Nonfiction Award

Trio House Press

We seek un-agented full-length creative nonfiction manuscripts including memoir, essay collections, etc. 50,000 - 80,000 words.

📅 Deadline: May 15, 2024

Military Anthology: Partnerships, the Untold Story

Armed Services Arts Partnership

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Non-fiction, Poetry, and Short Story

Partners are an integral aspect of military life, at home and afar, during deployment and after homecoming. Partnerships drive military action and extend beyond being a battle buddy, wingman, or crew member. Some are planned while others arise entirely unexpectedly. Spouses, family, old or new friends, community, faith leaders, and medical specialists all support the military community. Despite their importance, the stories of these partnerships often go untold. This anthology aims to correct that: We will highlight the nuances, surprises, joy, sorrow, heroism, tears, healing power, and ache of partnerships. We invite you to submit the story about partnerships from your journey, so we can help tell it.

$500 Editors' Choice award

$250 for each genre category (prose, poetry, visual art)

Great American Think-Off

New York Mills Regional Cultural Center

The Great American Think-Off is an exhibition of civil disagreement between powerful ideas that connect to your life at the gut level. The Cultural Center, located in the rural farm and manufacturing town of New York Mills, sponsors this annual philosophy contest.

📅 Deadline: April 01, 2024 (Expired)

Environmental Writing 2024

The writer and activist Bill McKibben describes Environmental Writing as "the collision between people and the rest of the world." This month, peer closely at that intersection: How do humans interact with their environment? Given your inheritance of this earth, the world needs your voices now more than ever.

Best entry: $100

Runner up: $50 | Best peer review: $50

📅 Deadline: April 22, 2024

Creative Nonfiction Prize

Indiana Review

Genres: Essay, Fiction, and Non-fiction

Send us one creative nonfiction piece, up to 5000 words, for a chance at $1000 + publication. This year's contest will be judged by Lars Horn.

📅 Deadline: March 31, 2024 (Expired)

Annual Contest Submissions

So To Speak

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Flash Fiction, LGBTQ, Non-fiction, and Poetry

So To Speak is seeking submissions for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction with an intersectional feminist lens! It is no secret that the literary canon and literary journals are largely comprised of heteronormative, patriarchal, cisgender, able-bodied white men. So to Speak seeks work by writers, poets, and artists who want to challenge and change the identity of the “canonical” writer.

💰 Entry fee: $4

📅 Deadline: March 15, 2024 (Expired)

Young Sports Journalist 2024

The Young Sports Journalist Competition, 2024, seeks well-argued articles from aspiring journalists aged 14-21. Winning entries will be published online and printed in the Summer Issue of Pitch. Critiqued by our panel of accomplished judges, winners will also receive a £50 cash prize and offered work experience here at PITCH HQ. The competition runs from 7 February 2024 to 5 April 2024. And winners will be announced in May.

Publication in magazine and online

📅 Deadline: April 05, 2024 (Expired)

Journalism Competition 2024

What are the most important issues taking place close to home? Perhaps a rare bird sighting near your town? Or a band of young people in your province fighting for access to higher education? This month, immerse yourself in a newsworthy event inside the borders of your own country, and invite us there through your written reporting.

📅 Deadline: July 22, 2024

Work-In-Progress (WIP) Contest

Unleash Press

Genres: Crime, Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Humor, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Novel, Novella, Poetry, Science Fiction, Science Writing, and Young Adult

We aim to assist writers in the completion of an important literary project and vision. The Unleash WIP Award offers writers support in the amount of $500 to supplement costs to aid in the completion of a book-length work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. Writers will also receive editorial feedback, coaching meetings, and an excerpt/interview feature in Unleash Lit.

Coaching, interview, and editorial support

💰 Entry fee: $35

📅 Deadline: July 15, 2024

Bacopa Literary Review Annual Writing Contest

Writers Alliance of Gainesville

Bacopa Literary Review’s 2024 contest is open from March 4 through April 4, with $200 Prize and $100 Honorable Mention in each of six categories: Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Flash Fiction, Free Verse Poetry, Formal Poetry, and Visual Poetry.

📅 Deadline: April 04, 2024 (Expired)

Tusculum Review Nonfiction Chapbook Prize

The Tusculum Review

A prize of $1,000, publication of the essay in The Tusculum Review’s 20th Anniversary Issue (2024), and creation of a limited edition stand-alone chapbook with original art is awarded. Editors of The Tusculum Review and contest judge Mary Cappello will determine the winner of the 2024 prize.

📅 Deadline: June 15, 2024

Jane Austen Society of North America Essay Contest

Jane Austen Society of North America

Genres: Children's and Essay

JASNA conducts an annual student Essay Contest to foster the study and appreciation of Jane Austen's works in new generations of readers. Students world-wide are invited to compete for scholarship awards in three divisions: high school, college, and graduate school.

$1,000 scholarship

Two nights’ lodging for JASNA’s Annual General Meeting

📅 Deadline: June 02, 2022 (Expired)

National Essay Contest

U.S. Institute of Peace

This year, AFSA celebrates the 100th anniversary of the United States Foreign Service. Over the last century, our diplomats and development professionals have been involved in groundbreaking events in history – decisions on war and peace, supporting human rights and freedom, creating joint prosperity, reacting to natural disasters and pandemics and much more. As AFSA looks back on this century-long history, we invite you to join us in also looking ahead to the future. This year students are asked to explore how diplomats can continue to evolve their craft to meet the needs of an ever-changing world that brings fresh challenges and opportunities to the global community and America’s place in it.

Runner-up: $1,250

WOW! Women On Writing Quarterly Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest

WOW! Women On Writing

Genres: Non-fiction and Essay

Seeking creative nonfiction essays on any topic (1000 words or less) and in any style--from personal essay and memoir to lyric essay and hybrid, and more! The mission of this contest is to reward bravery in real-life storytelling and create an understanding of our world through thoughtful, engaging narratives. Electronic submissions via e-mail only; reprints/previously published okay; simultaneous submissions okay; multiple submissions are okay as long as they are submitted in their own individual e-mail. Open internationally.

2nd: $300 | 3rd: $200 | 7 runner-ups: $25 Amazon Gift Cards

Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award

Killer Nashville

Genres: Crime, Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Novel, Poetry, Science Fiction, Script Writing, Short Story, and Thriller

The Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award is committed to discovering new writers, as well as superlative books by established authors and, upon discovery, sharing those writers and their works with new readers. There are a large number of both fiction and non-fiction categories you can enter.

💰 Entry fee: $79

Literary and Photographic Contest 2023-2024

Hispanic Culture Review

Genres: Essay, Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction, and Poetry

As we move forward we carry our culture wherever we go. It keeps us alive. This is why we propose the theme to be “¡Hacia delante!”. A phrase that means to move forward. This year we ask that you think about the following questions: What keeps you moving forward? What do you carry with you going into the future? How do you celebrate your successes, your dreams, and your culture?

Publication in magazine

📅 Deadline: February 07, 2024 (Expired)

NOWW 26th International Writing Contest

Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop (NOWW)

Open to all writers in four categories: poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and critical writing.

2nd: $100 | 3rd: $50

💰 Entry fee: $7

Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing

Genres: Essay, Fantasy, Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Non-fiction, Poetry, Science Writing, and Short Story

The Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing will be administered to the winner of a literary contest designed to champion innovative hybrid and cross-genre work.

💰 Entry fee: $22

📅 Deadline: February 16, 2024 (Expired)

Red Hen Press Women's Prose Prize

Red Hen Press

Genres: Fiction, Non-fiction, Short Story, Essay, Memoir, and Novel

Established in 2018, the Women’s Prose Prize is for previously unpublished, original work of prose. Novels, short story collections, memoirs, essay collections, and all other forms of prose writing are eligible for consideration. The awarded manuscript is selected through a biennial competition, held in even-numbered years, that is open to all writers who identify as women.

Publication by Red Hen Press

📅 Deadline: February 28, 2024 (Expired)

The Hudson Prize

Black Lawrence Press

Each year Black Lawrence Press will award The Hudson Prize for an unpublished collection of poems or prose. The prize is open to new, emerging, and established writers.

💰 Entry fee: $28

Discover the finest writing contests of 2024 for fiction and non-fiction authors — including short story competitions, essay writing competitions, poetry contests, and many more. Updated weekly, these contests are vetted by Reedsy to weed out the scammers and time-wasters. If you’re looking to stick to free writing contests, simply use our filters as you browse.

Why you should submit to writing contests

Submitting to poetry competitions and free writing contests in 2024 is absolutely worth your while as an aspiring author: just as your qualifications matter when you apply for a new job, a writing portfolio that boasts published works and award-winning pieces is a great way to give your writing career a boost. And not to mention the bonus of cash prizes!

That being said, we understand that taking part in writing contests can be tough for emerging writers. First, there’s the same affliction all writers face: lack of time or inspiration. Entering writing contests is a time commitment, and many people decide to forego this endeavor in order to work on their larger projects instead — like a full-length book. Second, for many writers, the chance of rejection is enough to steer them clear of writing contests. 

But we’re here to tell you that two of the great benefits of entering writing contests happen to be the same as those two reasons to avoid them.

When it comes to the time commitment: yes, you will need to expend time and effort in order to submit a quality piece of writing to competitions. That being said, having a hard deadline to meet is a great motivator for developing a solid writing routine.

Think of entering contests as a training session to become a writer who will need to meet deadlines in order to have a successful career. If there’s a contest you have your eye on, and the deadline is in one month, sit down and realistically plan how many words you’ll need to write per day in order to meet that due date — and don’t forget to also factor in the time you’ll need to edit your story!

For tips on setting up a realistic writing plan, check out this free, ten-day course: How to Build a Rock-Solid Writing Routine.

In regards to the fear of rejection, the truth is that any writer aspiring to become a published author needs to develop relatively thick skin. If one of your goals is to have a book traditionally published, you will absolutely need to learn how to deal with rejection, as traditional book deals are notoriously hard to score. If you’re an indie author, you will need to adopt the hardy determination required to slowly build up a readership.

The good news is that there’s a fairly simple trick for learning to deal with rejection: use it as a chance to explore how you might be able to improve your writing.

In an ideal world, each rejection from a publisher or contest would come with a detailed letter, offering construction feedback and pointing out specific tips for improvement. And while this is sometimes the case, it’s the exception and not the rule.

Still, you can use the writing contests you don’t win as a chance to provide yourself with this feedback. Take a look at the winning and shortlisted stories and highlight their strong suits: do they have fully realized characters, a knack for showing instead of telling, a well-developed but subtly conveyed theme, a particularly satisfying denouement?

The idea isn’t to replicate what makes those stories tick in your own writing. But most examples of excellent writing share a number of basic craft principles. Try and see if there are ways for you to translate those stories’ strong points into your own unique writing.

Finally, there are the more obvious benefits of entering writing contests: prize and publication. Not to mention the potential to build up your readership, connect with editors, and gain exposure.

Resources to help you win writing competitions in 2024

Every writing contest has its own set of submission rules. Whether those rules are dense or sparing, ensure that you follow them to a T. Disregarding the guidelines will not sway the judges’ opinion in your favor — and might disqualify you from the contest altogether. 

Aside from ensuring you follow the rules, here are a few resources that will help you perfect your submissions.

Free online courses

On Writing:

How to Craft a Killer Short Story

The Non-Sexy Business of Writing Non-Fiction

How to Write a Novel

Understanding Point of View

Developing Characters That Your Readers Will Love

Writing Dialogue That Develops Plot and Character

Stop Procrastinating! Build a Solid Writing Routine

On Editing:

Story Editing for Authors

How to Self-Edit Like a Pro

Novel Revision: Practical Tips for Rewrites

How to Write a Short Story in 7 Steps

How to Write a Novel in 15 Steps

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After you submit to a writing competition in 2024

It’s exciting to send a piece of writing off to a contest. However, once the initial excitement wears off, you may be left waiting for a while. Some writing contests will contact all entrants after the judging period — whether or not they’ve won. Other writing competitions will only contact the winners. 

Here are a few things to keep in mind after you submit:

Many writing competitions don’t have time to respond to each entrant with feedback on their story. However, it never hurts to ask! Feel free to politely reach out requesting feedback — but wait until after the selection period is over.

If you’ve submitted the same work to more than one writing competition or literary magazine, remember to withdraw your submission if it ends up winning elsewhere.

After you send a submission, don’t follow it up with a rewritten or revised version. Instead, ensure that your first version is thoroughly proofread and edited. If not, wait until the next edition of the contest or submit the revised version to other writing contests.

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Student Essay Collection Published

The English Department is pleased to announce the publication of Prize-Winning Student Essays from the University of Massachusetts Amherst English Department 2017-2022 (PDF).

This publication is a collection of a dozen recent prize-winning scholarly essays written in undergraduate English courses at UMass Amherst. The collection aims to honor student writers and showcase the writing done in our undergraduate English courses, especially in writing genres, like the critical essay, that don’t always get the attention they deserve. Every essay collected here was the winner of one of our three academic writing prizes, awarded annually in the spring:

• The Charles A. Peters Prize, awarded to the best essay on English literature written between 1558 and 1667.
• The Sanderson Prize, awarded to the best essay on any subject.
• The Steinbugler Prize, awarded to the best essay on any subject written by a student in their junior or senior year.

English major Emma Gill, who did most of the work to make this publication possible, writes, "The goal of this collection is to celebrate award-winning academic writing in a publication similar to that of the department’s other student journals, which are more focused on creative writing. With this project I was able to read top tier work from award-winning students over the last five years, and it was nothing short of inspiring."

E445 South College 150 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003 (413) 545-5456

Berggruen Prize Essay Competition

The Berggruen Prize Essay Competition seeks to stimulate new thinking and innovative concepts while embracing cross-cultural perspectives across fields, disciplines, and geographies. By posing fundamental philosophical questions of significance for both contemporary life and for the future, the competition will serve as a complement to the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture, which recognizes major lifetime achievements in advancing ideas that have shaped the world.

The inspiration for the competition originates from the role essays have played in the past, including the essay contest held by the Académie de Dijon. In 1750, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's essay Discourse on the Arts and Sciences , also known as The First Discourse , won and notably marked the onset of his prominence as a profoundly influential thinker. Similarly, our competition aspires to create a platform for groundbreaking ideas and intellectual innovation.

The annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition will accept submissions in two languages: Chinese and English. Each language category will have a prize of $25,000 USD and intends to recognize one winner, though there may be multiple winners in any given year.

The Berggruen Institute will host an award ceremony and convene the authors of the winning essays in dialogue with established scholars and thinkers at one of our global centers. We plan to publish the winning essays in our award-winning English-language magazine Noema and Chinese-language magazine Cuiling , giving readers insight into perspectives of both East and West.

We are inviting essays that follow in the tradition of renowned thinkers such as Rousseau, Michel de Montaigne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Submissions should present novel ideas and be clearly argued in compelling ways for intellectually serious readers. We are not seeking peer-reviewed academic work. Below is a selection of exemplary essays that epitomize the genre and style we look for. While some of these pieces are authored by already distinguished thinkers, we have chosen them primarily for their exceptional embodiment of genre and style.

• Chomsky, N. (1967). The responsibility of intellectuals. The New York Review of Books .
• Frankfurt, H. G. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. Journal of Philosophy , 68(1), 5-20.
• Fukuyama, F. (1989). The end of history? The National Interest , 16, 3–18.
• Huntington, S. P. (1993). The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs , 72(3), 22-49.
• Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review , 83(4), 435-450.
• Sontag, S. (1966). Against interpretation. In Against Interpretation and Other Essays (pp. 3-14). Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
• Walker, S. (2023). AI is life. Noema Magazine .
• Zadeh, J. (2021). The tyranny of time. Noema Magazine .

Eligibility Criteria

Submission requirements, code of conduct, terms & conditions.

Required fields are marked with *

Advisory Panel

• Lucas Angioni
• Arjun Appadurai
• Julian Baggini
• Tongdong Bai
• Rajeev Bhargava
• Annabel Brett
• Craig Calhoun
• Dipesh Chakrabarty
• Lesong Cheng
• Weiwen Duan
• Robyn Eckersley
• Sam Fleischacker
• Christia Fotini
• Gan Chunsong
• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
• Asher Jiang
• Michèle Lamont
• Meira Levinson
• Chenyang Li
• Qiaoying Lu
• Jianhua Mei
• Pankaj Mishra
• Viren Murthy
• Thierry Ngosso
• Mathias Risse
• Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem
• Vladimir Safatle
• Allison Simmons
• Smita Sirker
• Xiangchen Sun
• Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
• Samantha Vice
• Robin R. Wang
• Dingxin Zhao
• Zhao Tingyang

By submitting your essay, you give the Berkeley Prize the nonexclusive, perpetual right to reproduce the essay or any part of the essay, in any and all media at the Berkeley Prize’s discretion.  A “nonexclusive” right means you are not restricted from publishing your paper elsewhere if you use the following attribution that must appear in that new placement: “First submitted to and/or published by the international Berkeley Undergraduate Prize for Architectural Design Excellence ( www.BerkeleyPrize.org ) in competition year 20(--) (and if applicable) and winner of that year’s (First, Second, Third…) Essay prize.” Finally, you warrant the essay does not violate any intellectual property rights of others and indemnify the BERKELEY PRIZE against any costs, loss, or expense arising out of a violation of this warranty.

Registration and Submission

You (and your teammate if you have one) will be asked to complete a short registration form which will not be seen by members of the Berkeley Prize Committee or Jury.

REGISTER HERE.

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The Review of English Studies Essay Prize

Instructions to authors, 1. submissions.

Submissions for the essay competition must arrive no later than 30 June annually.

Please send your entries via the online submission system . Click on the 'Publish' link and select 'Essay Prize' from the drop-down menu in the 'Manuscript Type' box. If you need assistance regarding the online submission system, please click on the 'Online Submission Instructions' link.

It is the responsibility of the author to secure permission for the reproduction of illustrations and quotations from copyrighted material.

2. Presentation

Manuscripts.

• All material should be double-spaced; leave ample margins (unjustified to the right) and number pages consecutively.
• An abstract of about 200 words summarising the main points of the submission should appear before the main text commences. When you submit your entry using the online submission system, please ensure you include your abstract in the separate box and also at the start of your essay. The abstract of the prize-winning essay will appear both in the journal and online.
• Number footnotes consecutively throughout the paper. Notes appear as footnotes in the published journal, but please use endnotes in your manuscript submission. An initial unnumbered footnote may be included giving brief acknowledgements, but this should be omitted from the text for peer review.

Contributions should be presented in the house style of RES . References should be used sparingly, and follow the models:

L. Danson, Wilde's Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (Oxford, 1997).

For articles:

Alison Smith, 'Becoming a Historian', RES , 51 (1998), 44-52.

Subsequent references should use surname and short title (not 'op.cit' or author's surname only). For a full style guide, refer to New Hart's Rules.

Enquiries about the competition should be addressed to the General Editor, Colin Burrow - [email protected] . Technical enquiries about the online submission system should be addressed to Penny Brown, at [email protected]

Editorial statement

The Review of English Studies was founded in 1925 to publish literary-historical research in all areas of English literature and the English language from the earliest period to the present. From the outset, RES has welcomed scholarship and criticism arising from newly discovered sources or advancing fresh interpretation of known material. Successive editors have built on this tradition while responding to innovations in the discipline and reinforcing the journal's role as a forum for the best new research.

The Review of English Studies (RES) is pleased to continue the sponsorship of The RES Essay Prize, launched in 1999. The aim of the RES Essay Prize is to encourage fine scholarship amongst postgraduate research students in Britain and abroad. The essay can be on any relevant subject from the earliest period to the present.

Recent prize-winning essays .

The winner's prize will consist of:

• Publication of the winning essay in  The Review of English Studies
• £500 worth of Oxford University Press books
• One year's free subscription to RES

Other entries of sufficient quality may be invited to publish.

Entry Requirements

The Review of English Studies Essay Prize is open to anyone currently studying for a higher degree, in Britain or abroad, or to anyone who was awarded one no earlier than January 2022, except employees of Oxford University Press and other persons connected to Oxford University Press.

• Essays are to be no longer than 10,000 words, inclusive of all footnotes and references
• The closing date for entries will be 30 June annually
• The Editors hope to notify shortlisted entrants by 30 September annually
• The winner of the RES prize will be required to verify his or her status as a current or recent postgraduate student
• Essays can be on any topic or period of English literature or the English language, provided that they fulfil the requirements of the editorial statement of The Review of English Studies , as reproduced above
• Entries submitted to The RES Essay Prize must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere
• It is a condition of entry that all entrants will be prepared to license copyright in all media in their entries to Oxford University Press if accepted for publication
• The decision of the judges will be final, and no correspondence will be entered into by the Editors
• No alternative prizes will be available
• In the unlikely event that, in the judges' opinion, the material submitted is not of a suitable standard, no prize or prizes will be awarded
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Writing Contests, Grants & Awards

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The Writing Contests, Grants & Awards database includes details about the creative writing contests—including poetry contests, short story competitions, essay contests, awards for novels, and more—that we’ve published in Poets & Writers Magazine during the past year. We carefully review the practices and policies of each contest before including it. Ours is the most trusted resource for legitimate writing contests available anywhere.

Omnidawn Publishing

Single poem contest.

A prize of $1,000 is given annually for a single poem. The winner also receives 20 copies of a letterpress broadside of the winning poem. Claire Marie Stancek will judge. Using...

Desperate Literature

Short fiction prize.

A prize of €1,500 (approximately $1,628), publication in the Desperate Literature prize anthology, and a weeklong residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation’s castle in the...

Poetry Foundation

Ruth lilly and dorothy sargent rosenberg poetry fellowships.

Five fellowships of $27,000 each are given annually to U.S. poets between the ages of 21 and 31. Using only the online submission system, submit 10 pages of poetry and an...

Florida Review

Editor’s prizes.

Three prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Florida Review are given annually for a poem or group of poems, a short story, and an essay. The editors will judge....

University of Arkansas Press

Etel adnan poetry prize.

A prize of $1,000 and publication by University of Arkansas Press is given annually for a first or second poetry collection by a writer of Arab heritage. Series editors Hayan...

New Ohio Review

Literary prizes.

Three prizes of $1,500 each and publication in New Ohio Review are given annually for a poem or group of poems, a short story, and an essay. Submit a poem or group of...

Pen Parentis

Writing fellowship for new parents.

A prize of $2,000, a year of mentorship, and publication in Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine is given annually to a fiction writer who is the parent of a child under...

Whiting Foundation

Creative nonfiction grants.

Up to 10 grants of $40,000 each are given annually for creative nonfiction works-in-progress to enable writers to complete their books. Creative nonfiction writers under...

Poetry and Short Story Awards

Two prizes of $1,000 each and publication in Sixfold are given quarterly for a group of poems and a short story. Using only the online submission system, submit up to...

Australian Book Review

Elizabeth jolley short story prize.

A prize of $6,000 AUD (approximately $3,931) is given annually for a short story. A second-place prize of $4,000 AUD (approximately $2,621) and a third-place prize of $2,500...

Chapbook Prize

A prize of $1,000, publication by Oversound , and 50 author copies is given annually for a poetry chapbook. Diana Khoi Nguyen will judge. Using only the online submission...

University of Iowa Press

Iowa poetry prize.

Publication by University of Iowa Press is given annually for a poetry collection. Using only the online submission system, submit a manuscript of 50 to 150 pages with a $20...

Short Story Contest

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Marsh Hawk Press

Poetry prize.

A prize of $1,000 and publication by Marsh Hawk Press is given annually for a poetry collection. John Keene will judge. Using only the online submission system, submit a...

Autumn House Press

Nonfiction prize.

A prize of $1,000 and publication by Autumn House Press is given annually for a book of nonfiction. The winner also receives a $1,500 travel and publicity grant. Clifford...

Poetry International

Poetry international prize.

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Poetry International is given annually for a single poem. Using only the online submission system, submit up to three poems of any...

University of Pittsburgh Press

Agnes lynch starrett poetry prize.

A prize of $5,000 and publication by University of Pittsburgh Press is given annually for a debut poetry collection. Using only the online submission system, submit a...

Inlandia Institute

Hillary gravendyk prizes.

Two prizes of $1,000 each, publication by the Inlandia Institute, and 20 author copies are given annually for a poetry collection by a U.S. resident and a poetry collection by...

Tadpole Press

100-word writing contest.

A prize of $2,000 is given biannually for a work of flash poetry or prose. Manuscripts written in a language other than English are accepted when accompanied by an English...

Tupelo Press

Berkshire prize.

A prize of $3,000, publication by Tupelo Press, and 20 author copies is given annually for a first or second poetry collection. English translations of works originally written...

Ghost Story

Supernatural fiction award.

A prize of $1,500 and publication on the Ghost Story website and in the 21st Century Ghost Stories anthology series is given biannually for a short story with a...

Noemi Press

A prize of $2,000 and publication by Noemi Press is given annually for a book of poetry. The editors will judge. Using only the online submission system, submit a manuscript of...

McGill University

Montreal international poetry prize.

A prize of $20,000 Canadian (approximately $14,807) and publication in the Montreal Poetry Prize anthology is given biennially for a poem. A.E. Stallings will judge, and...

Breakwater Review

Peseroff prize.

A prize of $1,000 and publication in Breakwater Review ...

Moon City Press

Poetry award.

A prize of $1,000 and publication by Moon City Press is given annually for a poetry collection. The editors will judge. Using only the online submission system, submit a...

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Prize-Winning Thesis and Dissertation Examples

Published on September 9, 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on July 18, 2023.

It can be difficult to know where to start when writing your thesis or dissertation . One way to come up with some ideas or maybe even combat writer’s block is to check out previous work done by other students on a similar thesis or dissertation topic to yours.

This article collects a list of undergraduate, master’s, and PhD theses and dissertations that have won prizes for their high-quality research.

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Table of contents

Award-winning undergraduate theses, award-winning master’s theses, award-winning ph.d. dissertations, other interesting articles.

University : University of Pennsylvania Faculty : History Author : Suchait Kahlon Award : 2021 Hilary Conroy Prize for Best Honors Thesis in World History Title : “Abolition, Africans, and Abstraction: the Influence of the “Noble Savage” on British and French Antislavery Thought, 1787-1807”

University : Columbia University Faculty : History Author : Julien Saint Reiman Award : 2018 Charles A. Beard Senior Thesis Prize Title : “A Starving Man Helping Another Starving Man”: UNRRA, India, and the Genesis of Global Relief, 1943-1947

University: University College London Faculty: Geography Author: Anna Knowles-Smith Award:  2017 Royal Geographical Society Undergraduate Dissertation Prize Title:  Refugees and theatre: an exploration of the basis of self-representation

University: University of Washington Faculty:  Computer Science & Engineering Author: Nick J. Martindell Award: 2014 Best Senior Thesis Award Title:  DCDN: Distributed content delivery for the modern web

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University:  University of Edinburgh Faculty:  Informatics Author:  Christopher Sipola Award:  2018 Social Responsibility & Sustainability Dissertation Prize Title:  Summarizing electricity usage with a neural network

University:  University of Ottawa Faculty:  Education Author:  Matthew Brillinger Award:  2017 Commission on Graduate Studies in the Humanities Prize Title:  Educational Park Planning in Berkeley, California, 1965-1968

University:  University of Ottawa Faculty: Social Sciences Author:  Heather Martin Award:  2015 Joseph De Koninck Prize Title:  An Analysis of Sexual Assault Support Services for Women who have a Developmental Disability

University : University of Ottawa Faculty : Physics Author : Guillaume Thekkadath Award : 2017 Commission on Graduate Studies in the Sciences Prize Title : Joint measurements of complementary properties of quantum systems

University:  London School of Economics Faculty: International Development Author: Lajos Kossuth Award:  2016 Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Title:  Shiny Happy People: A study of the effects income relative to a reference group exerts on life satisfaction

University : Stanford University Faculty : English Author : Nathan Wainstein Award : 2021 Alden Prize Title : “Unformed Art: Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel”

University : University of Massachusetts at Amherst Faculty : Molecular and Cellular Biology Author : Nils Pilotte Award : 2021 Byron Prize for Best Ph.D. Dissertation Title : “Improved Molecular Diagnostics for Soil-Transmitted Molecular Diagnostics for Soil-Transmitted Helminths”

University:  Utrecht University Faculty:  Linguistics Author:  Hans Rutger Bosker Award: 2014 AVT/Anéla Dissertation Prize Title:  The processing and evaluation of fluency in native and non-native speech

University: California Institute of Technology Faculty: Physics Author: Michael P. Mendenhall Award: 2015 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics Title: Measurement of the neutron beta decay asymmetry using ultracold neutrons

University:  Stanford University Faculty: Management Science and Engineering Author:  Shayan O. Gharan Award:  Doctoral Dissertation Award 2013 Title:   New Rounding Techniques for the Design and Analysis of Approximation Algorithms

University: University of Minnesota Faculty: Chemical Engineering Author: Eric A. Vandre Award:  2014 Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics Title: Onset of Dynamics Wetting Failure: The Mechanics of High-speed Fluid Displacement

University: Erasmus University Rotterdam Faculty: Marketing Author: Ezgi Akpinar Award: McKinsey Marketing Dissertation Award 2014 Title: Consumer Information Sharing: Understanding Psychological Drivers of Social Transmission

University: University of Washington Faculty: Computer Science & Engineering Author: Keith N. Snavely Award:  2009 Doctoral Dissertation Award Title: Scene Reconstruction and Visualization from Internet Photo Collections

University:  University of Ottawa Faculty:  Social Work Author:  Susannah Taylor Award: 2018 Joseph De Koninck Prize Title:  Effacing and Obscuring Autonomy: the Effects of Structural Violence on the Transition to Adulthood of Street Involved Youth

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Trinity College launched the Gould Prize for Essays in English Literature in 2013. This is an annual competition for Year 12 or Lower 6th students. The Prize has been established from a bequest made by Dr Dennis Gould in 2004 for the furtherance of education in English Literature. This Essay Prize has the following aims. First, to encourage talented students with an interest in English Literature to explore their reading interests further in response to questions about the subject. Second, to encourage students with an interest in literature to apply for a University course in English. Finally, to recognise the achievements of high-calibre students from whatever background they may come, as well as the achievements of those who teach them.

Candidates are invited each year to submit an essay of between 1,500 and 2,500 words in answer to a question from our list.

Candidates must write their essays entirely on their own: that is, without help from their school or from artificial intelligence. Your essay should represent your most ambitious, original, and imaginative critical work. We are not looking for submissions in creative writing. We also expect a close engagement with the prompt. Essays can be written on all works of literature composed originally in the English language, from anywhere in the world. Also eligible are all works of literature originally written in the British Isles in any other language (e.g.. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Irish, French, Latin, Greek, etc). Excluded are works from beyond the British Isles that were not originally written in English (e.g. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina ).

The list of questions for the 2024 competition can be found here .

The deadline is 12 noon UK time on 1 August 2024; late submissions cannot be accepted. Results will be announced around mid-September.

The competition carries a First Prize of £600, to be split equally between the candidate and his or her school or college, and a Second Prize of £400, which again is to be shared equally between the candidate and his or her school or college.  The school or college’s portion of each prize will be issued in the form of book tokens with which to buy books of or about English literature (under the broad definition set out above).  In addition, further deserving essays of a high quality will receive high commendations or commendations.  Authors of prize-winning and highly commended essays will be invited to visit the College.

About your school

Past gould prize-winners.

First Prize: Hazel Morpurgo (Colyton Grammar School) Second Prize: Livia Ursini Parker (North London Collegiate School)

Joint First Prize: Ruby Deakin (High Storrs School, Sheffield) Naomika Saran (The Shri Ram School, India)

First Prize: Mr L Beevers (Heckmondwike Grammar School) Second Prize: Miss E Connor (Kings Norton Girls’ School)

First Prize: Miss M Wu (Wellington College) Second Prize: Miss Crosbie-Chen (Westminster School)

First Prize: Miss E McNeill (Notting Hill & Ealing High School) Second Prize: Miss J Cartwright (St Aidan’s and St John Fisher’s Associated Sixth Form)

First Prize: Mr B Jureidini (Esher College) Second Prize: Miss E Laurence (South Hampstead High School)

First Prize: Miss H Smith (Chelmsford County High School for Girls) Second Prize: Mr C Graff (University College School, London)

First Prize: Miss M Little (Bexhill College) Second Prize: Miss M Abdel-Razek (Wimbledon High School)

Joint First Prize: Miss M Benham (King Edward VI Five Ways School, Birmingham) Mr E Patel (Merchant Taylor’s School, Northwood)

Joint First Prize: Miss A Cattley (Saffron Walden County High School) Miss E Cavell (St Paul’s Girls’ School)

First Prize: Miss E Franklin (King Edward’s Sixth Form College, Stourbridge) Second Prize: Miss J Simms (Greenhead College, Huddersfield)

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Pisay student natalia araña wins the new york times’ essay writing contest.

Philippine Science High School (PSHS) Grade 11 student Natalia Araña has won The Learning Network’s Second Annual STEM Writing Contest organized by The New York Times for her essay, “Mycowood Violins: A Different Kind of Time Machine.”

Araña was named one of the eleven international winners of the prestigious writing tilt, which challenged teenagers from around the world to choose a compelling scientific topic and then write an engaging 500-word explanation for it.

The winning essay, which stood out from 3,741 entries received by The New York Times, involves the discovery of scientist Francis W.M.R. Schwarze, who found a way to replicate the sound of the world’s most famous violin – the Stradivarius, through white-rot fungi.

Only a few hundred of the original violins made by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari over 250 years ago survived, according to the essay.

To recreate the sound of the iconic Stradivarius violins, Schwarze and his team used fungi to mimic the effects of a cold climate on wood, producing biotech violins with a tone matching those of a Stradivarius.

“For three months, Dr. Schwarze let these decomposers feast on the wood until its cells shrunk, letting the timber reach its optimal density without largely affecting the speed of sound travel through the material. The result? A higher radiation ratio that made the newly created ‘mycowood’ one step closer to the resonance wood used by Stradivari — close enough, in fact, that most listeners in a blind test mistook a fungi-treated violin for the original Stradivarius!” the 16-year-old Araña explains.

The positive results produced by Schwarze’s study meant that the fungi-treated violins could one day become available to talented young musicians who would otherwise be unable to afford their own Stradivarius.

Natalia Araña’s essay entitled, “Mycowood Violins: A Different Kind of Time Machine,” along with the other winning works, have been published by The New York Times on April 29, 2021. Read her story here .

Filipinos who recently bagged top literary prizes include UP Cebu student Christian Andrei Nuez Laplap who won the United Kingdom’s International Hammond House Literary Prize and Filipino-American author Erin Entrada Kelly’s historical fiction “We Dream of Space” which was awarded the John Newbery Honor for distinguished children’s books.

SEND CONGRATULATIONS in the comments below to Philippine Science High School (PSHS) Grade 11 student Natalia Araña who has won The Learning Network’s Second Annual STEM Writing Contest organized by The New York Times for her essay, “Mycowood Violins: A Different Kind of Time Machine.”

Good News Pilipinas is celebrating its 15th Anniversary in 2021 by giving away prizes! Subscribe to our  Good News Pilipinas! TV YouTube channel  and enter the raffle by sending us an email to [email protected]

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2024 creative writing award winners, april 11, 2024.

Quantá Holden | Duke English | Digital Communication Specialist

The English Department at Duke University is honored to announce the winners of the 2024 Creative Writing Contests and Creative Writing Scholarships. Annually, the department administers creative writing contests to recognize fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry works by English majors and non-major undergraduates. 

The English Department is honored to announce the winners of its 2024 writing contests. The department administers writing contests to recognize fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and critical writing by English majors and non-major undergraduates. 

Congratulations to all of this year's winners! 

Anne Flexner Memorial Award for Fiction Family members and friends of former English student Anne Flexner (1945) established the Anne Flexner Memorial Award for Creative Writing to recognize undergraduates for their work in fiction and poetry. 

Makee Gonzalez Anderson ’24  -  “Here, in the Past Tense” Second Prize: Emma Huang, ’25  -  "ABEL’S PLACE"

Reynolds Price Award for Fiction The Reynolds Price Fiction Award was established in memory of the distinguished novelist, essayist, poet, and public intellectual Reynolds Price, a graduate of Duke and professor in the English Department for over 50 years.  Tomas Esber, ’24  -  “Ridgewood” Second Prize: Matthew Chen, ’26  -  “ABC” & “Chair"

CREATIVE NONFICTION

George P. Lucaci Award for Creative NonFiction This award was created to encourage creative nonfiction writing and honor George P. Lucaci, a former Duke student who has actively supported undergraduate creative writing in the English Department for many years. 

Ruby Wang, ’24  -  “Blood Orison” Second Prize: Rowan Huang, ’24  -  “Arms Outstretched"

Academy of American Poets Prize Founded in 1934 in New York City, the Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization advocating for American poets and poetry.  Its mission is to support American poets at all stages of their careers and foster contemporary poetry appreciation.  Nima Babajani-Feremi, ’24  -  “Dreams to Persepolis” Honorable Mention: Tyler King, ’25  -  "NO QUARTER"

Anne Flexner Memorial Award for Poetry   Family members and friends of former English student Anne Flexner (1945) established the Anne Flexner Memorial Award for Creative Writing to recognize undergraduates for their work in fiction and poetry.   Jocelyn Chin, 24 -   “Endurance” Second Prize:   Arielle Stern, ’25  -  "The Poem as Event"

Terry Welby Tyler, Jr. Award for Poetry This award was established by the family of Terry Welby Tyler, Jr., who would have graduated with the class of 1997 to recognize and honor outstanding undergraduate poetry.  Arim Lim, ’26  -  "Archeopteryx"

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Origin director Ava DuVernay on grief and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who inspired her latest film

Grief is complicated, says filmmaker Ava DuVernay (Selma; 13th).

"It is its own life journey that most of us will experience, unfortunately, and you know it has sorrowful moments, but there is also beauty in that journey," she says. "It's all intertwined."

DuVernay was grieving when the inimitable Oprah Winfrey handed her a copy of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson's non-fiction book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in 2020.

"We were in the midst of a pandemic, I had lost some loved ones and we were dealing, in the United States, with the murder of George Floyd , which was a huge cultural and social event here; a tragedy," DuVernay recalls.

"I didn't feel like reading a 500-page book about some pretty heavy subject matter. I just wasn't in the headspace."

Wilkerson's searing treatise – one of former President Barack Obama's favourite books – posits that the great racial rift in America is as much about brutal caste structures as it is about skin colour. Drawing parallels with India's treatment of the Dalits, or "untouchables", and Nazi persecution of Jewish people, it's a confronting read. After two months, DuVernay picked up and was exhilarated by Wilkerson's theories.

"The idea of caste as being the foundational principle of so many of the -isms that we experience in our lives — whether it's racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism or whatever — the bedrock of all of that is this very fundamental idea that I'm better than you because of this set of random traits and that I will organise society and I will accrue power and status based on that," says DuVernay

"It sparked a fresh way of thinking about old things."

Blurred lines

Channelling her grief through the momentous text, DuVernay decided to turn it into a film. But she approached the material in a fresh way, crafting an intriguing biopic about Wilkerson's fraught experience writing the book.

"I wanted to tell a story about a woman who was a teacher, who is galvanised by this cultural phenomenon and wants to share these ideas with us," DuVernay says.

Three of Wilkerson's family members died while she tackled the thesis.

"This woman was going through great tragedy, the horrors of losing the three closest people to you in your life within a 16-month period. How do you endure?" DuVernay says.

And yet endure Wilkerson does. The remarkable Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor steps into the author's shoes, towering in the central role. She had worked with DuVernay before, starring as Sharonne, the mother of Yusef Salaam, in the director's powerful Netflix miniseries  When They See Us , about five real-life Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused of raping a white woman.

"I really needed someone who was going to be an intellectual partner with me, because the subject matter is pretty dense," DuVernay says.

"And if there's one word that I think of when I consider Aunjanue, it's rigour. She's a very disciplined actor, highly intelligent and she gives us a superb performance."

As we follow Wilkerson's inquisitive journey through America's south and on to Berlin and New Dehli, her interviews with experts give way to dramatic re-creations.

Origin opens with the goosebump-inducing last moments of teenager Trayvon Martin , played by Myles Frost. We meet Nazi Party member August Landmesser (Finn Wittrock), who fell in love with and married a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler (Victoria Pedretti), and is the subject of a famous photo in which he refuses to participate in the "Heil Hitler" salute.

Caste-confounding Dalit professor Suraj Yengde plays himself.

"As a documentarian, I like blurring those edges," DuVernay says of casting Yengde. "I was working in the narrative form, but there are some documentary-esque textures."

Love stories

Both DuVernay and Wilkerson make sense of the world through their work.

"This time that we're in, it feels intense to us. But there's never been a time when there has not been war, tragedy, sorrow and pain happening somewhere, whether we know about it," DuVernay says.

"Some of my colleagues, like [ Dune director] Denis Villeneuve, are futurists. They're thinking about what's ahead and the worlds to come.

"And I want to learn about what we've done and how we can learn from it."

While much of DuVernay's work tackles difficult material, she sees it from another angle.

"When They See Us is about five boys who Donald Trump relegated to being criminals, by taking out a full-page ad to demonise them when they were innocent. He wanted to throw away the key and at one point said that they should be killed," she says.

"But at the end of the four-part series, you see the triumph of overcoming that. That is a joyous journey, for me as a storyteller. It's not a weight. Selma is not a weight. 13th is not a weight.

"It's telling the stories of the triumph of the people who have survived."

To DuVernay, they are love stories.

"Colin in Black & White [about American footballer and activist Colin Kaepernick's high school years] is a love story between him and his parents. When They See Us is a love story about the families that stood by these boys through thick and thin and were ostracised. Selma is about the love of your tribe. Origin is a love story about human connection and addressing grief," she says.

Art connects us all, DuVernay argues: "Whether it's film, literature, music, painting, sculpture or the culinary arts, going home and whoever is there puts love into what they make for you, or what you make for yourself: That's art.

"Art is just the beauty of life, and these are the things that remind us of our humanity."

Origin is in cinemas from April 4.

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The Nobel Winner Who Liked to Collaborate With His Adversaries

By Cass R. Sunstein

Mr. Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard and an author of “Noise,” with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony.

Our all-American belief that money really does buy happiness is roughly correct for about 85 percent of us. We know this thanks to the latest and perhaps final work of Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner who insisted on the value of working with those with whom we disagree.

Professor Kahneman, who died last week at the age of 90, is best known for his pathbreaking explorations of human judgment and decision making and of how people deviate from perfect rationality. He should also be remembered for a living and working philosophy that has never been more relevant: his enthusiasm for collaborating with his intellectual adversaries. This enthusiasm was deeply personal. He experienced real joy working with others to discover the truth, even if he learned that he was wrong (something that often delighted him).

Back to that finding, published last year , that for a strong majority of us, more is better when it comes to money. In 2010, Professor Kahneman and the Princeton economist Angus Deaton (also a Nobel Prize winner) published a highly influential essay that found that, on average, higher-income groups show higher levels of happiness — but only to a point. Beyond a threshold at or below $90,000, Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton found, there is no further progress in average happiness as income increases.

Eleven years later, Matthew Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, found exactly the opposite : People with higher income reported higher levels of average happiness. Period. The more money people have, the happier they are likely to be.

What gives? You could imagine some furious exchange in which Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton made sharp objections to Dr. Killingsworth’s paper, to which Dr. Killingsworth answered equally sharply, leaving readers confused and exhausted.

Professor Kahneman saw such a dynamic as “angry science,” which he described as a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders” and “as a contest, where the aim is to embarrass.” As Professor Kahneman put it, those who live in that nasty world offer “a summary caricature of the target position, refute the weakest argument in that caricature and declare the total destruction of the adversary’s position.” In his account, angry science is “a demeaning experience.” That dynamic might sound familiar, particularly in our politics.

Instead, Professor Kahneman favored an alternative that he termed “adversarial collaboration.” When people who disagree work together to test a hypothesis, they are involved in a common endeavor. They are trying not to win but to figure out what’s true. They might even become friends.

In that spirit, Professor Kahneman, well into his 80s, asked Dr. Killingsworth to collaborate, with the help of a friendly arbiter, Prof. Barbara Mellers, an influential and widely admired psychologist. Their task was to look closely at Dr. Killingsworth’s data to see whether he had analyzed it properly and to understand what, if anything, had been missed by Professor Kahneman and Professor Deaton.

Their central conclusion was simple. Dr. Killingsworth missed a threshold effect in his data that affected only one group: the least happy 15 percent. For these largely unhappy people, average happiness does grow with rising income, up to a level of around $100,000, but it stops growing after that. For a majority of us, by contrast, average happiness keeps growing with increases in income.

Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Their adversarial collaboration showed that the real story is more interesting and more complicated than anyone saw individually.

Professor Kahneman engaged in a number of adversarial collaborations, with varying degrees of success. His first (and funniest) try was with his wife, the distinguished psychologist Anne Treisman. Their disagreement never did get resolved. (Dr. Treisman died in 2018.) Both of them were able to explain away the results of their experiments — a tribute to what he called “the stubborn persistence of challenged beliefs.” Still, adversarial collaborations sometimes produce both agreement and truth, and he said that “a common feature of all my experiences has been that the adversaries ended up on friendlier terms than they started.”

Professor Kahneman meant both to encourage better science and to strengthen the better angels of our nature. In academic life, adversarial collaborations hold great value . We could easily imagine a situation in which adversaries routinely collaborated to see if they could resolve disputes about the health effects of air pollutants, the consequences of increases in the minimum wage, the harms of climate change or the deterrent effects of the death penalty.

And the idea can be understood more broadly. In fact, the U.S. Constitution should be seen as an effort to create the conditions for adversarial collaboration. Before the founding, it was often thought that republics could work only if people were relatively homogeneous — if they were broadly in agreement with one another. Objecting to the proposed Constitution, the pseudonymous antifederalist Brutus emphasized this point: “In a republic, the manners, sentiments and interests of the people should be similar. If this be not the case, there will be a constant clashing of opinions, and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those of the other.”

Those who favored the Constitution thought that Brutus had it exactly backward. In their view, the constant clashing of opinions was something not to fear but to welcome, at least if people collaborate — if they act as if they are engaged in a common endeavor. Sounding a lot like Professor Kahneman, Alexander Hamilton put it this way : “The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties” in the legislative department of the government “often promote deliberation and circumspection and serve to check excesses in the majority.”

Angry science is paralleled by angry democracy, a “nasty world of critiques, replies and rejoinders,” whose “aim is to embarrass,” Professor Kahneman said. That’s especially true, of course, in the midst of political campaigns, when the whole point is to win.

Still, the idea of adversarial collaboration has never been more important. Within organizations of all kinds — including corporations, nonprofits, think tanks and government agencies — sustained efforts should be made to lower the volume by isolating the points of disagreement and specifying tests to establish what’s right. Asking how a disagreement might actually be resolved tends to turn enemies, focused on winning and losing, into teammates, focused on truth.

As usual, Professor Kahneman was right. We could use a lot more of that.

Cass R. Sunstein is a law professor at Harvard and an author of “Noise,” with Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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The Atlantic ’s 2024 National Magazine Award Winners and Finalists

Read the stories that were recognized at this year’s ASMEs.

For the third consecutive year, The Atlantic has won the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2024 National Magazine Awards.

Below is a list of the stories that received recognition from the American Society of Magazine Editors:

Winner: Profile Writing

“ Inside the Meltdown at CNN ”

By Tim Alberta

CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

Winner: Columns and Essays

“ The Ones We Sent Away ”

By Jennifer Senior

For The Atlantic ’s September 2023 issue, Senior wrote about her aunt Adele, who was institutionalized as a toddler because of an intellectual disability, and the life she could have lived.

Winner: Reviews and Criticism

“ The Death of the Sex Scene ,” “ Porn Set Women Up From the Start ,” and “ Madonna Forever ”

By Sophie Gilbert

A collection of probing essays exploring womanhood in pop culture.

Finalist:   Feature Writing

“ Jenisha From Kentucky ”

By Jenisha Watts

When Watts moved to New York to pursue journalism, she hid her past. For T he Atlantic ’s October 2023 cover story, she wrote about her tumultuous childhood in Kentucky, and the freedom that writing offered her.

Finalist: Single-Topic Issue:

“ To Reconstruct the Nation ”

The Atlantic’ s December 2023 issue was led by Vann R. Newkirk II and included pieces from Lonnie G. Bunch III, Drew Gilpin Faust, Eric Foner, Adam Harris, Peniel E. Joseph, Vann R. Newkirk II, and Jordan Virtue on America’s most radical experiment. Plus: a new play by Anna Deavere Smith, David W. Blight annotates Frederick Douglass, and more.

Winner: Best Print Illustration

Illustration by Didier Viodé

Columbus-born writer Elisa Gonzalez wins $50K Whiting Award

Columbus native Elisa Gonzalez has been a storyteller since before she could read, dictating tales for her mother to jot down. Now, she’s a published author and Fulbright Scholar who was recently named a winner of a prestigious writing award.

Gonzalez has been chosen as a recipient of a Whiting Award, given annually to 10 exceptional emerging writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama.

“It’s an honor and it’s kind of surreal. Writing is so much about doing things alone, at least for me, and persevering with the conviction that what you’re making matters,” said Gonzalez, 35, who was raised on Columbus’ southeast side and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. "Any sort of outside validation means a lot."

10 things to do: What's happening in and around Columbus this weekend

Whiting Award

Whiting Award candidates are nominated by an anonymous pool of writers, professors, editors, agents, critics, booksellers, artistic directors of theaters, dramaturgs and literary festival directors.

Winners are selected by a small group of recognized writers, literary scholars and editors who meet four times a year to debate the works and choose the final 10.

Sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, Gonzalez said the $50,000 award would relieve financial pressure while she worked.

“In the literary world, the award is quite well-known and winning it suggests some confidence in my future work and that’s wonderful,” she said.

A graduate of Yale and New York universities, Gonzalez has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review and other publications.

Her debut poetry collection, “Grand Tour,” published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), has been well-received by the literary community.

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Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in literature, as well as Gonzalez’s teacher and mentor, said of her protégé’s work, “These poems make me feel as if poems have never before been written."

Next on Gonzalez’s to-do list are the nonfictional “Strangers on Earth,” and “The Awakenings,” a novel in which a murder rocks a fictional Ohio small town. Both are forthcoming from FSG.

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