English Awards Celebration 2024 | Department of English

Event title slide decorate with buckeye leaves and nuts, announcing "The Department of English Awards Celebration, April 15, 2024"

For their vision and generosity, the Department of English gives our sincere thanks to all the many donors who support our departmental awards and scholarships.

Kitty O. Locker Undergraduate Professional Writing Contest

1st Place: Jane Dimel, Audrey Kralic, Becca Monahan, Sydney Moore, Moriah Smith
Plastic-Free Great Lakes Campaign Formal Marketing Proposal
Instructor: Guy Spriggs, English 3304 (Autumn 2023)

2nd Place: Katherine Hayek, Gowrav Mannem
Plastic-Free Great Lakes Campaign Formal Marketing Proposal
Instructor: Christa Teston, English 3304 (Spring 2023)

Chen Ya and Siuha Anita Liu Award for Professional Writing

Devin Edwards

Kitty O. Locker Prize for Excellence in Business Communication

Hannah Locher
Checking Boxes: Investigating Adoption Preference Forms as Technical Rhetorics at the Confluence of the Medical, Social, and Bureaucratic

Kitty O. Locker Research Grant

Caleb Gonzalez
Examining the Programmatic Practices of First-Year Composition at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs)

Jordan Woodward
Coalition-Building, Technical Communication, and Place-Making in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Region

Morgan Beers
Shifting Digital Practices: COVID-19 and Connection through Vernacular Digital Practice

Kitty O. Locker Travel Awards

Natalie Aloi, Hannah Locher, Olivia Rowland

Reba Elaine Pearl Burkhardt Roorbach Award in Creative Nonfiction

Awardee: Eddie Bautista Garcia
"$2560.88"
Judge's comments: A story of perseverance against all odds and privations to become a proper sax player. The prose is brisk and funny, but the story is poignant, and profoundly moving.

Honorable Mention: Theodore Jasper
"Flat"

Judge: Bill Roorbach funds these awards in memory of his grandmother and his mother, and in gratitude for his time on the English faculty at OSU. His new book, BEEP, about a squirrel monkey who saves the world, is forthcoming July 16, 2024, from Algonquin Books.

Jacobson Short Story Award

1st Place: Julian McLaughlin
"Tennis"
Judge's comments: This story scintillates with details: blue gum trees at sunset, the punk of a tennis ball hitting a chain-link fence, a young man’s sticky thigh after a session of clandestine lovemaking. Elliptically structured, it eschews exposition, providing instead a mosaic of shimmering, precise moments, which, together, render a tender, intimate portrait of a fraught parent-child relationship. Brief, luminous, and infused with longing, this story shines like a star at dusk.

2nd Place: Eriana Kellis
"Housekeeping"
Judge's comments: Objects in this story have a life of their own: rendered in exquisite detail, effectively hinting at the life of the human family who cohabits with them. As the story’s protagonist moves through this vibrantly populated domestic scene, his gaze moves strangely, less something he bestows on objects, and more something the objects extract from him. The result is a deliciously sensory story, one that meditates thoughtfully on the stuff of life—and on the life of stuff.

3rd Place: Mika Hodges
“but thanks for the orange, i guess”
Judge's comments: The narratorial voice here brims with personality. As the narrator addresses his deceased husband, his tone shifts continually, moving from snarky and playful, to angry and despondent, to loving and tender. Skillfully handled, these shifts evoke the complex panoply of emotions which accompany grief and sketch out a portrait of two lovers. As poignant as it is wide ranging, this story’s voice speaks powerfully to the complexities of love and loss.

Judge: Alyssa Quinn is the author of the novel Habilis and the chapbook Dante's Cartography. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College and can be found at alyssaquinn.net

Gertrude Lucille Robinson Award

1st Place: Mika Hodges
"survey of hell probably"
Judge's comments: “survey of hell probably” is a delight from its audacious title to its zinger of an ending—I love the story’s crass lyricism, especially in its descriptions of embodiment. This story exists in a body, and in reading it I could feel that body inhale, cringe, exhale, flinch. It was an immense pleasure to take this (probable) survey of hell.

2nd Place: Jade Josie
"To My Bones"
Judge's comments: “To My Bones” is weird and gross and funny and an interesting exploration of both cheesy metaphor and insecurity. I loved seeing the story’s dreamy sappiness slip inexorably into grotesque nightmare. The image of the protagonist trying vainly to put the squishy pieces of their sloughed-off boyfriend back together both horrified me and made me laugh.

3rd Place: Kaylee Farr
"Vestis"
Judge's comments: “I have been loved and I will never recover” is a hell of a line, and it’s not the only revelation that "Vestis," a poem about all kinds of rot, offers up. Is grief a kind of rot? Is nostalgia? I don’t know, but I’ll be thinking about that for a while.

Judge: Molly Olguín is a writer, educator, and monster aficionado. Her collection The Sea Gives Up The Dead was chosen by Carmen Maria Machado for the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2025. With Jackie Hedeman, she is the creator of the audio drama The Pasithea Powder. She teaches English and creative writing to high school students in Seattle, Washington.

Citino Poetry Award

1st Place Undergraduate: Theodore Jasper
"Genesis"
Judge's comments: This poet emits a distinct voice within these poems. From the beginning, readers are invited into the first poem before we move into a narrative of the speaker’s childhood. There is a masterful use of metaphor, simile, and other poetic elements. This folio also tackles difficult subjects with frankness.

2nd Place Undergraduate: Maddie Betts
"original sin" and other poems
Judge's comments: This poet’s collection evokes a melancholic mood, presenting us with atmospheric details that emit tension through juxtapositions of both traditionally positive and traditionally negative content. There is also a close attention to language that makes use of various poetic elements like alliteration and assonance.

1st Place Graduate: Isaiah Back-Gaal
"Purple Rain" and other poems
Judge's comments: This poet utilizes specific details that evoke the five senses, imagery that adds texture, and a kind of lyrical narrative that creates cohesion between the poems (familial stories, imagined scenes, cultural traditions, etc.). I also find that the use of form shows a deep understanding of how a poem’s form should match the content.

2nd Place Graduate: Andrew Romriell
HIV: An Abridged Biography
Judge's comments: This collection of pieces engages in hybrid form, as the poems within appear to act as poetry and memoir. There is a true intimacy in what is revealed, and the content, searching for a partner, explores the many challenges one faces within the judgment and coldness of online dating apps.

Judge: Genevieve Betts is the author of the poetry collections A New Kind of Tongue (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and An Unwalled City (Prolific Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, Hotel Amerika, The Tishman Review, The Literary Review, Cloudbank, Sky Island Journal, and in other journals and anthologies. She teaches for Arcadia University's low-residency MFA program and is an assistant professor at Santa Fe Community College.

Haidee Forsyth Burkhardt Award in Creative Nonfiction

Awardee: Julie Kim
“OKAY GOODBYE THANK YOU”
Judge's comments: It’s a taut yet graceful unfolding of identity in the context of family, community, and culture.

Honorable Mention: Claudia Owusu
"Where the Body Don't Break, Still Blacks & Blues"

Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Fiction

Kathryn LeMon
"(dis)taste"
Judge's comments: The three elegant and unsettling stories included in the manuscript exhibit an impressive stylistic range as the writer marries food writing with horror, plays with structure and tone, and leans into the grotesque and the strange to explore human appetites of all kinds. Reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe and, more recently, Stephanie Danler and Carmen Maria Machado.

Judge: Keija Parssinen is the author of The Ruins of Us, which earned a Michener-Copernicus award, and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, which won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic.com, The New York Review of Books Daily, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Puerto del Sol, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Hedgebrook. She is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing at Kenyon College.

Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Non-Fiction

Awardee: Danielle Batalion Ola
"I Had Better Tell You Where I Am" and "In Search of Higher Ground"
Judge's comments: Intricately braided and self-assured, these pieces brim with urgency and a breathless pursuit for understanding.

Honorable Mention: Claudia Owusu
"Eulogies for Girlhood"

Judge: Eliza Smith’s work has appeared in The Cut, The New York Times, and elsewhere and has been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. With Haley Swanson, she is co-editor of the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial). She earned an MA in magazine writing from the Missouri School of Journalism and an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University.

Helen Earnhart Harley Creative Writing Fellowship Award in Poetry

Awardee: Claudia Owusu
Drown or Drought
Judge's comments: I loved the terrific singing in every poem, the rich details. Heaven was “the little circle of sky that blinded.” I loved the communion with family and place, the spiritual and physical vitality from Ghana to Columbus, Ohio. There is wonder and humility and grace here. I felt nourished by these merciful, sustaining, joyful poems. After reading these poems, I felt hope for humanity.

Honorable Mention: Skyler Barnes
"Stela" and 15 poems

Honorable Mention: Lexie Smereka
"Detroit River Tour" & Other Poems

Honorable Mention: Sappho Stanley
"Dropped Corduroy," "Rapture Anxiety," "Like an old teddy bear I'm filled with walnuts & estrogen & men," "In Ohio," "The Moon Reverse," "I'm From Blue," "Lakeside Mirror Stage"

Judge: Alessandra Lynch is the author of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment (Awardee of the Balcones Prize for Poetry, one of the NY Times’ Best Books of 2017) and three other poetry collections. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New England Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Lannan Foundation. Her fifth collection, Wish Ave will be published in October 2024.

Tara M Kroger Award

Awardee: Nikki Barnhart
"Static"
Judge's comments: I was immediately struck by this story’s rich reflective voice. I love the narrator’s movements through time, building out a complicated central relationship while resisting the easy moves towards nostalgia or cynicism. In many ways, "Static" strikes me as a story about storytelling. This meditative consideration of distance and misremembrance left me thinking about what it means to love somebody for a long time—to love their many selves.

Honorable Mention: Heather McCabe
"Everywhere"

Honorable Mention: Spencer Newsad
"Year of the Snake"

Judge: Jennifer Galvão is a writer and teacher from New York. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, she is a Kenyon Review Fellow. Her fiction has been recognized with a Hopwood Award and support from DisQuiet International, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches at Kenyon College.

Academy of American Poets Award/Arthur Rense Prize

Awardee: Misha Ponnuraju
"Letter to 外公 (or, Wàigōng, or My Mother’s Father)," "Hantu," "Omni Trium Perfectum"
Judge's comments: “Letter to 外公 (or, Wàigōng, or My Mother’s Father)" is a knock out--beautifully rendered, complicated, and heartbreaking. The footnotes are intriguing and provide a kind of curious relief from the tension in the poem. "Hantu" is imaginative and lovely. The repetitions of teeth and feeding are particularly effective. The form of "Omni Trium Perfectum" is interesting and ultimately effective. Overall this poet has a lovely way with image, language, and emotional intensity.

Honorable Mention: Isaiah Back-Gaal
"Protest Song for David Buckel" and other poems

Honorable Mention: Claudia Owusu
"What We Did as Children"

Judge: Jacqueline Allen Trimble

Vandewater Poetry Award

Awardee: Danielle Batalion Ola
"Cycles of Migration"
Judge's comments: This ghazal—or near-ghazal—is both fluid and continually dynamic, deftly balancing repetition and invention as it rings surprising, expressive changes on the word “butterflies.” Stanza by stanza, the poem deepens and expands, with something new awaiting at every turn. The poem entices and persuades through its abiding of uncertainty and through its attention to the music of its vowels and consonants. Even to the final line, the music persists.

Honorable Mention: Katelyn Roth
"When I am Quiet…"

Judge: Chris Forhan is the author of three books of poetry: Black Leapt In; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars; and Forgive Us Our Happiness. He has also published two works of nonfiction, most recently A Mind Full of Music: Essays on Imagination and Popular Song. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes and lives in Indianapolis, where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Butler University.

Digital Media Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Work

Maddie Betts
"Porphyria's Murderer" (composite image)
Instructor: Jill Galvan, English 4540 (Autumn 2023)

Finley Voss
"Sports Marketing Information: For Beginners" (website)
Instructor: Luke Van Niel, English 1110.01 (Spring 2023)

Digital Media Prize for Outstanding Graduate Work

Sabrina Durso and Michelle Gabay
Reading Aloud a Reading About Reading: An Experiment in Creating an Academic Audio-Text
Judge's comments: The judges praised Durso and Gabay's project for its clear purpose, intentional and consistent accessibility design, and thought-provoking collaborative audio components.

Writing and Information Literacy in English Prize for Outstanding English 1110 Project

Awardee: Emily Frantz
The Great Territorial Experiment of Higher Education
Instructor: Christiane Buuck, English 1110.01 (Autumn 2023)

Honorable Mention: Isabella Carmichael
Black Women & the Stereotypes They Face in Media
Instructor: Sam Risak, English 1110.01 (Autumn 2023)

Honorable Mention: Thomas Antes
Law and Society During AIDS
Instructor: Jonathan Thomas, English 1110.01 (Autumn 2023)

Award for Excellence in Teaching by a First-Year Graduate Teaching Assistant

Zainab Saleh

Second-Year Writing Outstanding Student Composition Award

Wesley McPherson
Get Out: Unmasking Racial & Gender Dynamics in Contemporary America
Instructor: Mary Gibaldi, English 2367.01 (Autumn 2023)

Outstanding Graduate Teaching Associate in Second-Year Writing

Morgan Beers
English 2367.08 (Spring 2023)

David O. Frantz Thesis Award

Sarah Grace Smith
The Softest Touch
Advisor: Lee Martin

English Prize for Best Scholarship on Social Justice

Awardee: Wonjoo Lee
Candace and the Model Minority Stereotype in Severance
Instructor: Joe Ponce, English 4587 (Autumn 2023)

Honorable Mention: Olivia Dearth
Humor, History, and Strategy — the BSU’s Open Letter to Dick Gregory
Instructor: Beverly Moss English 4567S (Autumn 2023)

Genevieve M. Critel Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Composition

Awardee: Maddie Betts
Guess Who: A Portrait of Ohio Writing Center Consultants
Instructor: Allison Kranek, CSTW 3467S (Spring 2023)
Judge's comments: By bringing in primary research examining Writing Center tutor specializations across four public universities in Ohio, [this paper] best highlights the importance of their chosen topic and the implications of not questioning what they term “the STEM desert” in Writing Centers. This essay nicely demonstrates how, despite claims to do so, Writing Centers may not necessarily meet all their clients’ needs due to an overrepresentation of language and humanities tutors. Furthermore, the piece articulates key questions other researchers might ask in seeking to address this issue and further research the topic. While the paper could have drawn on more than genre theory in articulating the problem, and cited other works that examine the STEM lack in WC expertise, it presents a clear exigence and articulation of a contemporary and pressing problem.

Honorable Mention: Kienna Whitman
Understanding the Appeals of Animal Crossing
Instructor: Jonathan Buehl, English 4189 )Spring 2024)
Judge's comments: This essay on the affective rhetorical strategies of Animal Crossing engages in a thoughtful and detailed analysis of pathos within the video game. The author develops a strong theoretical framework that mobilizes Burke’s guilt-redemption cycle to analyze their first-hand in-game interactions. Through this close reading, the essay savvily asks readers to consider the uses of guilt and shame as strategies in video games and the larger implications for video users/players.

Lord Denney's Players Introductory Shakespeare Prize

Awardee: Anna Pichler
“We Cannot All Be Masters”—Lucian Msmati’s Compelling Portrayal of Iago in Iqbal Khan’s Othello
Instructor: Tamara Mahadin, English 2221 (Autumn 2023)

Honorable Mention: Eliza Porostosky
Love in Shakespeare's Macbeth: A Catalyst of Destruction and Restoration
Instructor: Antony Shuttleworth, English 2220 (Autumn 2023)

Lord Denney's Players Advanced Shakespeare Prize

Awardee: David Jordan
Unto Some Monstrous State: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
Instructor: Alan Farmer, English 4520.01 (Spring 2023)

Honorable Mention: Nick Orzo (Honorable Mention)
Prospero's Utopia: All for One
Instructor: Jennifer Higginbotham, English 3398 (Autumn 2023)

Robert E. Reiter Prize for Critical Analysis

Maddie Betts
The Reveille Remembers: Sarah Piatt’s “Army of Occupation,” Arlington, and the Lost Cause
Instructor: Elizabeth Renker, English 4592 (Autumn 2023)

Elaine H. and George W. Hairston Scholarship

Blaise Reader III

Robert N. and Sharon S. Gandee Endowed Scholarship

Ava Moore

Rosemarie Sena Scholarship for Excellence in English Studies

Sarah Garfinkel

Virginia Hull Diversity and Inclusion Award

Madina Davlatboyeva

Minor in Professional Writing Unpaid Internship Grant

Emily Burnheimer, Lizzie Eidt, Danielle Ingram, Minaicis Mata, Madison Roth, Kienna Whitman, Katherine Hayek, David Heilbrunn

Estrich Paper Prize

Tallon Kennedy
"This Town is Killing Me": Trans Gothic Survival in the Music of Underscores, Jane Remover, and Ethel Cain
Instructor: Clare Simmons, English 7840 (Autumn 2023)

Brian McHale Award for the Best Graduate Paper in Narrative Studies

Trista Koehler
Narrative Obfuscation and Adversity in Dark Souls
Instructor: Robyn Warhol, English 6761 (Autumn 2023)

English Graduate Human Rights Award

Samantha Risak
Picture (Im)perfect: Comics in Narrative Medicine
Instructor: Christa Teston, English 6410 (Autumn 2023)

Muste Dissertation Prize

Awardee: Andrew Bishop
The Problems of Leisure in the Industrial-Era US
Advisor: Beth Hewitt

Honorable Mention: Keira Hambrick
Naming What They Know: Instructor Perspectives on Students’ Prior Knowledge Transfer in First-Year Writing
Advisor: Kay Halasek

Alumni Grants for Graduate Research and Scholarship

Samantha Trzinski

Hayes Graduate Research Forum

2nd Place, Arts Oral Division: Lauren Chivington

Graduate Associate Teaching Award

Elise Robbins

Presidential Fellowship

Andrew Romriell
Bodies, Lakes, and Other Uninhabitable Places
Advisor: Elissa Washuta

These awards are granted by the College of Arts and Sciences.

Honors Faculty Service Award

Alan Farmer

Outststanding Staff Award

Mike Bierschenk

Paul W. Brown Excellence in Teaching Award

Molly Farrell

Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award in Arts and Humanities

Karen Winstead

Virginia Hull Award

Mintzi Martínez-Rivera

These awards are granted by various university-level offices and organizations.

Distinguished Scholar Award

Robyn Warhol

Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Society of Fellows

Margaret Price

President and Provost's Award for Distinguished University Service

Beth Hewitt

Program of Excellence in Engaged Scholarship Award

Lord Denney's Players
Sarah Neville, Creative Director

Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Lecturer

Amy Tibbals

Sphinx Honorary Member

Pranav Jani

These awards are granted by various national organizations.

Folger Shakespeare Library Non-Residential Fellowship

Elizabeth Kolkovich

NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resource Grant

Robyn Warhol
The Part Issue Project: Making 19th-century Serial Temporality Discoverable and Accessible in HathiTrust

NEH Scholarly Digital Project Grant

Chris Highley