Presented by the Department of Communication & Media
Writing for Social Change
Dempsey Vogel: “A Modern Proposal”
Judges' Note:
This work ingeniously draws upon Jonathan Swift's renowned satire “A Modest Proposal,” spinning out the interconnectedness of America’s socio-political issues: capitalism, healthcare, welfare, and mass shootings. This piece is not for the faint of heart; however, neither is making social change. Extremity and gallows humor are often the best ways to draw attention to social wrongs. They are also tools often used by the marginalized. This is a highly creative and inventive piece of writing.
Emma Shark: "The Gay Bar Scene"
Judges' Note:
This essay intimately captures the friendship, identity, dating, alcoholism, and the bar scene from the point of view of an LGBTQ narrator.
Peter Tse: “Our Solitude”
Judges' Note:
A fascinating work of creative nonfiction about place and change, the effects of gentrification, and class differences. The level of specificity in the details allows readers to vividly picture the places Tse takes them.
Creative Prose & Drama: Graduate
Justin Buergi: “Blink"
Judges' Note:
“Blink” is an entertaining political satirical twist on the classic Faustian bargain. The story’s diagnosis of our dystopian political moment hits hard. But it also presents a realist vision of democracy as a utopian aspiration, something that has to be fought for loudly, proudly, and every day—especially in the bleakest of times.
Creative Prose and Drama: Undergraduate
Bianca Bacchus: “Persephone and I”
Judges' Note:
The language of “Persephone and I” is fresh and propulsive, imbuing the story of a typical night in the life of an adolescent boy with a sense of excitement and wonder. While the scenes are bustling and active with the energy of other young characters, the reader is made to identify closely with our protagonist— a young man who knows himself all too well but is still looking to find where he fits.
Sadie Ehrenberg: “Canning Peaches”
Judges' Note:
The story of canning peaches with one’s mother becomes an extended metaphor for the visceral quality of mother-daughter relationships and the way that early memories can sit in the body for a lifetime. The piece employs heavy language to express heavy emotions, yet uses form effectively to give breath to the heat circulating throughout the piece.
Kaelan Wilburn: “An Encounter with Our Lord and Savior at Taco Bell Last Tuesday”
Judges' Note:
Maggie Smith, in her viral and now iconic poem, “Good Bones,” writes, “for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children.” This is the sentiment at the heart of Wilburn’s short story, which offers us a window into the mind of a factory worker who leads his child to believe he’s a scientist. Bringing a refreshing dose of levity and grace to questions of truth and virtue, you’re sure to be thinking of this story the next time you find yourself in the parking lot of a Taco Bell.
Graduate Electronic Media
Allie ES Wist & Hans Tursack: “Ruins We Already Have”
Judges' Note:
This multifaceted, experimental and self-reflexive piece is as provocative as it is mesmerizing in its productive flattening of quotation, commentary, and A.I. generated texts. In concert with its myriad text forms, it layers photographic, video, and technically-oriented images supported by a sound environment that is equal parts haunting, piercing, and meditative.
Justin Buergi: “Escaping the Friend Zone”
Judges' Note:
This text-based video game centers on the harassment of a character named Veronica and positions the player in the shoes of the harasser. It has elements of whimsy, but also of frustration, annoyance, and disgust as it satirically speaks to the experience of repeatedly being the subject of unwanted romantic advances.
Undergraduate Electronic Media
Michelle Lin: “Defining the Stitches”
Judges' Note:
Using fashion as a window into cultural history and incorporating evocative poetry inspired by iconic moments and movements in fashion, this excellent piece creates clever confluences and contrasts between illustrations, typography, and layout design.
Millat Saleem Husain: “Purpose in Chaos”
Judges' Note:
This piece uses poetry to cleverly weave together color theory, design, and text, grounding the theme, “Boundaries” in this engaging verbal-visual book.
Elena Haase: “Ghosts and Ghouls and Wraiths, Oh My!”
Judges' Note:
This original scenario for a tabletop roleplaying game is set in the haunted ruins of a village populated by complicated undead beings, and it promises an engaging game that will force its players into difficult moral quandaries.
Graduate Academic Essay
Fahmi Fahroji: “Coal Extraction and the Unruly Entanglements of Lives and Research in Borneo’s Mining Zones”
Judges' Note:
This essay’s elegant use of critical ethnographic methods achieves a snapshot of localized knowledges and processes within the presence of the Indonesian coal industry. The author’s thoughtful prose focuses on the human experience of coal extraction beyond simple references to material extraction. The detailed focus of the fieldwork remains situated and grounded in method, creating a complex narrative worthy of our highest award for emergent graduate scholarship.
Zihan Feng: “Digital Imaginaries in Chinese Historical Games: How We Depict the Silk Road Region with Cultural Biases”
Judges' Note:
This thematic analysis of depictions of the Silk Road in historic RPGs makes good use of the concept of a “digital imaginary” to argue that the region is depicted as a “secondary other” in digital storytelling. Feng presents a measured, critical contrast of the themes present in the selected works with the “realities” of the Silk Road. This is a well-organized research project that is both methodologically sound and thoughtful about the choice of method.
Hans Tursack: “Collision Mechanics: Digital Gravity and Bodily Resonance”
Judges' Note:
Tursack creates a fine work exploring the concept of gravity in mediation as an embodied experience better understood via the study and language of affect and phenomenology. Of special interest to the judges was the author's identification of “boredom” and “alienation” as byproducts of poor gravitational representation, creating a fun distinction between the grander claims and the lived experience we face as dissatisfied viewers. Stylistically the essay has great promise, and the proposed novel conceptual framework of “discorrelation” in CGI is important and fascinating.
Undergraduate Academic Essay
Allie Lebrecque: “A Cup of Colonialism: The Lifecycle of a Lipton Tea Bag”
Judges' Note:
This essay weaves historical research, cultural theory, and personal reflection into a seamless, elegant mediation on tea as a symbol and system of global inequality. The essay is rigorously sourced, thematically coherent, and critically engaged. This essay shines in making the ordinary extraordinary: a mundane, everyday object becomes a lens to examine empire, gender politics, and ecological ethics. Few essays manage to connect the global and the personal with such precision.
Sahsra Bharatha: “Cultural Perceptions of Time in Multiverse Narratives: A Quantum Approach”
Judges' Note:
Through a comparative analysis of films, the author deftly weaves complex quantum computing concepts with humanities and cultural studies to offer a nuanced and thoughtful analysis of cultural perspectives on time and space. The judges were especially impressed with how the author displayed interdisciplinary knowledge in a coherent and engaging way. In addition to a nuanced and insightful analysis, the author developed what they called a “quantum read,” which the judges found to be a unique contribution.
Sophia Mazzariello: “Resistance to Female Adolescence: A Literary Analysis of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding”
Judges' Note:
This essay offers an intellectually rigorous reading that both interprets McCullers’ work with deep insight and advances a powerful feminist critique. The author illuminates the novel with sensitivity and scholarly precision, offering not only close readings of the text but a broader intervention into how we understand girlhood, conformity, and power. The essay stands out for its originality in both scope and argument and the writing, which is at a professional level. The judges encourage the author to submit this piece to a feminist literary journal.
Rachel Raupp: “Hostility in the Place We Call Home: The Power of Destructive Design”
Judges' Note:
Through poignant examples, Raupp demonstrates how design choices target people who are unhoused, limiting the public sphere and pointing to the necessity for a new design paradigm.
Anya Sahni: “The Great Deadener of It’s Always Sunny”
Judges' Note:
The judges were impressed with Sahni’s ability to apply classic existential themes to contemporary media, as well as the author’s insightful questions about originality.
Graduate Poetry
Allyson Smith: "East of Denver"
Judges' Note:
Smith's winning poem, "East of Denver," is a spare, lyrical poem, polished in its simplicity and in the strength of its imagery. Its gorgeous rhyme feels so organic it could be accidental, yet it remains utterly inevitable, moving the rhythm of the poem forward through a series of haunting images, memories, and meandering thoughts. The reader leaves the poem with more questions than answers, just as haunted as the speaker from within.
Nyah Philip: "The Final Cauterization"
Judges' Note:
Philip’s poem speaks unhurriedly of things we inherit– desperate things. There are, indeed, wounds that can bridge generations, passing from mother to daughter. The poem's message is as urgent as it is gorgeous.
Elizabeth Becz: "Untitled"
Judges' Note:
In this unanticipated poem, Becz gives the reader something special: glimpses and flickers of memories, sharp and short and specific - moments of a summer day that invite the reader to sit and reflect for a while.
Undergraduate Poetry
Nyati Misra: "3000"
Judges' Note:
Misra's winning poem, "3000," demonstrates a strong poetic voice anchored, yes, in its roots and its history, but also in the present-day, quotidian life of a student—connected to and yet necessarily removed from such a history. Misra writes with clean diction, elegant imagery, and textured detail to bring to life the anguish and pride, exhaustion and fearlessness of both her ancestors' experiences and her own. The result is a poem that reaches far beyond its undergraduate nascence and stands firmly on its own carved-out ground.
Sam X. Innes: "Sun Wukong, Come Home to Me"
Judges' Note:
Innes has created a deeply memorable poem - a haunting and melodious song that offers its beautiful imagery to the reader like a gift.
Lala Mouille: "How Deep, How Holy"
Judges' Note:
In her arresting poem, Mouille reflects on grief, love, and the body - both the visible and that which is invisible. Here is a poem that changes the reader's breathing pattern for the terse moment during which it inhabits his or her thoughts.
Acknowledgements
The following individuals, groups, and organizations have made this event possible:
Skye Anicca
Anne Borrero
Kennedy Coyne
Sarah Cozort
June Deery
Justin Dowdall
Benj Gleeksman
Anita Greenfield
Kathleen Helman
Chris Jeansonne
Corinne Jones
Mitch Murray
Annika Nerf
Audrey Peterson-McCann
Sara Tack
Kate Tyrol
Yolande Schutter
Sonja Srinivasan
Helen Zhou
Department of Communication & Media
EMPAC
Friends of the Folsom Library
The New York State Writers’ Institute
Rensselaer Student Union
School of Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences
Vollmer Fries Lecture Series