Student Awards and Achievements - Spring 2025

We have some truly impressive students here in the English Department! From plays to poetry to short stories to art installations, the range of interests and talent is hard to wrap one’s head around. But one thing is for certain: these influences make our campus richer and our classrooms more engaging. Congratulations to all on your accomplishments! 

UW and National Awards and Recognition 

• Jacqueline Patterson read PhD candidate Rasheena Fountain's “Hope Isn’t A Vacant Lot” poem during the opening of her 2024 Carnot Prize acceptance speech at the University of Pennsylvania. The Kleinman Center awarded its Carnot Prize for distinguished contributions in energy policy to Patterson, founder and executive director of The Chisholm Legacy Project. Patterson's full speech is available here and begins at 13:35. You can also see Rasheena recite her poem in the video to the right. Rasheena wrote this poem during her time in the MFA program, and it is part of her memoir (see below!). 
• Third-year PhD student Jack Wolfram's had a new play-in-progress ONE FISH, TWO FISH that landed a Match fellowship with the Digital Development Project after stage readings and support from Theater Puget Sound, SCRiB LAB, and the Underground Theater. The fellowship entails compensated workshop time to fine-tune the script with a DDP dramaturg
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  Jack also celebrated his award-winning play "Paradise Untapped," which opened for two dynamic staged readings at Seattle's Annex Theatre on April 1st and 8th. These readings foreground Annex's mainstage production of the show next season, directed by Catherine Blake Smith. What an accomplishment, Jack! 
• MFA student K.C. Smith was featured at Unpoetry at the Frye, an event in coordination with the Frye’s exhibition of Hayv Kahraman’s “Look Me in the Eyes.” In collaboration with Unpoetry, writers and artists are invited to generate new work inspired by current exhibitions, with the goal to deepen engagement with the museum space and the artwork within, while challenging traditional definitions of poetry and language.
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  K.C.'s short story “The Cry of Daughters” is also one of the artworks in Fantastic Ingenuity: Imagine Feeling Something. Fantastic Ingenuity brings together seven distinguished Black artists from the University of Washington and the Seattle area in collaboration with Spam New Media Festival. A version of the story is also published in the Henry Art Gallery’s Speculative Fiction between Stars and Clay: Short Stories Inspired by Kelly Akashi's Encounters (2024). 

Publications and Writing Awards 

• Third year PhD student Sylvia Nasreen Chowdhury's short story "Sāhasa" was published in Sanctuaries: In Yours, I Found Mine, an anthology of South Asian writers. Her piece touches on questions of community and cultural nationalism in the diaspora, the complex relationships we have with our younger selves, and the impacts of survivorship on mental health. 
• PhD candidate Rasheena Fountain’s memoir Starfish Blues was published last year by Chin Music Press. Congratulations on this achievement, Rasheena! 
• JohnMorgan Baker’s article “‘Sexual Cripples’: Disability, Race, and Sex in Ralph Werther’s Writings, 1918–1922” was published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. 
• PhD student Furkan Kir’s article “Language Ideologies in New Media: Grassroots Resistance to a Multilingual Language Policy” was published in Current Issues in Language Planning. 
• PhD candidate Molly Porter was awarded Honorable Mention for the Mitchell Prize for Best Graduate Paper at the 2024 North American Victorian Studies Association conference. Her paper "John Muir, Re-creational Form and Fragment in Mount Rainier National Park" was presented at the local UW Seattle hub of the international flightless conference, EVENT 2024. 
• Molly also received an Honorable Mention for the Vcologies Early Career Prize, for her paper “‘The Cascade’s Rhyme’: Reading Thomas Hardy’s ‘Under the Waterfall’ Under a Different Waterfall”. The judges had this to say about the paper: “The appearance of lines from a Hardy poem on a sign at Snoqualmie Falls (western Washington State) seems intended to collapse historical specificity and geography alike into a generic appreciation of timeless natural sights and sounds. The committee was impressed by how the author uses it instead as a cue to open up the layered histories of places and poetry alike.” 
• PhD candidate Anselma Widha Prihandita’s story, “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being,” is nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. The same story also recently won the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for Best Novelette. Anselma wrote this story last summer at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UC San Diego, which she attended as their 2024 Octavia Butler Scholar. 
• PhD candidate Jacob Spenser Wilson published a review essay titled,  "Nationalism and Capitalism's Ever-Spiraling Crisis" in Spectre. 
• PhD student Andres Ayala-Patlan published “Self-Change as Global Change: Spiritual Activism and Its Place in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Legacy” in University of Toronto Quarterly. 

Simpson Center Awards 

Society of Scholars Summer Fellowship 

• Francesca Colonnese: Brain Poetics: Temporal Perception and Reading 19th Century Poetry 
• Angel Garduño: Debt, Dispossession, and (un)Making the Domestic Scene 
• Kexin Song: Articulate Fossils: Reading Extinction with Victorian Literature and Science

Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship 

• Siddharth Bhogra: Empires of Description
• Sikose Mjali: UNSILENCED- Unearthing SECHABA the voice of the ANC Underground (1967-1990): Corpus Linguistics, Digital Text Mining and Critical Discourse Analysis

Barclay Simpson Scholars in Public Fellowships 

• Abygail Gutierrez: Preparing the Body: Archives, Collectivity, and Grief in Community

Graduate Creative Writing Awards 

• Academy of American Poets Prize: Lillian Morton 
• Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction: Elizabeth Xochi Forrest 
• David Guterson Award (prose): K.C. Smith 
• Nelson Bentley MFA Award in Creative Writing (prose): Janet Barrow 
• Nelson Bentley MFA Award in Creative Writing (poetry): Ethan Robinson 
• Joan Grayston Poetry Prize: Para Vadhahong 

English Department Undergraduate Awards and Scholarships 

Undergraduate Awards 

• Hilen Essay Prize: Magana Marek 
• Honors Thesis Prize: Sedona Chelhoa 

Undergraduate Scholarships 

• Eilert Anderson Scholarship: Emily Gauthier 
• Edward G. Cox Scholarship: Job Alberg 
• Argentina Daley Endowed Fund: Aileen Kuang 
• Dave and Joan Empfield Endowed Scholarship: Aileen Kuang 
• Gamma Phi Beta - Winnifred S. Haggett Scholarship: Ava Robinson 
• Robert B. Heilman Endowed Scholarship: Emily Gauthier 
• Kollar Endowed Scholarship: Samuel Abraham 
• Charles H. Krysieniel Endowed Scholarship in LGBT Studies: Grace Archer 
• Roger Sale Scholarship: Aileen Kuang 
• Peter L. Thorpe Endowed Scholarship: Samuel Abraham 
• Tia Vall-Spinosa Sullivan Endowed Scholarship: Ava Robinson 
• Lucky Budd Waller Scholarship: Job Alberg 
• John Kimball Woolley and Afton Woolley Crooks Endowed Scholarship: Samuel Abraham, Emily Gauthier, Keira Murphy, Erin Mullins, Kira Schwetz, Sebastian Roederer, Job Alberg, Alyssa Quach 

Undergraduate Creative Writing Awards and Scholarships 

• Joan Grayston Poetry Prize: Eglantine Plisson 
• Edith K. Draham Scholarship: Evie Lucas 
• Stephanie Dassel Barden Scholarship in Creative Writing: Jackson Mallory 
• Eugene Van Buren Prize for Fiction: Phoebe Chu 
• Charlotte Paul Reese Fiction Award: Jaya Parsons 
• Arthur Oberg Award for Poetry: Ellianna Anisa Thayne