Sophomore Wins Poetry Prize
Congratulations to English major Hannah Fung-Weiner ’16, whose poem “Pact” won this year’s Mary Barnard Academy of American Poets Prize.
The ¹û½´ÊÓƵ contest was judged by poet Paulann Peterson, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, who has written six full-length collections of poetry, most recently Understory (Lost Horse Press 2013).
Fung-Weiner wrote “Pact” for her fall semester creative writing class with Prof. Samiya Bashir [creative writing 2012–]. “I was given this list of 10 nouns (brick, chair, artichoke, branch, pine, shrapnel, paper, avocado, corn, iguana) alongside a prompt for a love poem,” she says. “My first draft of 'Pact' contained each word; several iterations later, none survive.”
¹û½´ÊÓƵ’s contest is named in honor of distinguished poet , whose translations of Sappho and other classic poets won international acclaim. She is the subject of a new book by ,
The prize is sponsored by the Academy of Poets through its University and College Poetry Prize Program, which operates at 200 colleges and universities nationwide, and comes with a purse of $100.
Tags: Awards & Achievements, Students