Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 15, 2005|Volume 32, Number 26

Yale undergraduates make impressive showing in the Atlantic Monthly's writing contest

The names of young Yale authors have been found among the top winners of the Atlantic Monthly's annual Student Writing Contest since the competition was revived in 1997, but this year, Elis made their best showing yet.

Yale students took six awards -- including two first prizes and a third prize -- winning in all three categories.

The winning authors are: in poetry -- Alexander Nemser '06, first prize; in fiction -- Kanishk Tharoor '06, third prize, and Reese Kwon '05, honorable mention; and in non-fiction -- Jeremy Kutner '06, first prize, and Rebecca Sanborn '06 and Sarah Stillman '06, honorable mentions.

This is the second time in the past four years that Yale students took half the Atlantic Monthly awards in non-fiction, and more than a third of all non-fiction awards -- including three first-place prizes -- have been given to Elis in the past eight years, according to Fred Strebeigh, a lecturer in English and at the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, who teaches an undergraduate writing course.

The Atlantic Monthly writing contest is open to full-time undergraduate and graduate students at American universities. Submissions for the contest are original, unpublished work (the writing can have been published in a student publication) that demonstrates "superior quality of expression and craftsmanship." In the non-fiction category, the writers submit personal or journalistic essays. The winners of the contest are announced in the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

Michael Curtis, a senior editor for the Atlantic Monthly who oversees the contest, told the Yale Daily News last year that all readings for the contest are done blindly, yet the 20 or so non-fiction finalists -- sometimes as many as half of them -- have always included Yale students.

He attributed the Yale students' dominance of the non-fiction category to a variety of reasons -- but particularly, to the fact that, unlike their peers, the Eli authors do not write exclusively about themselves, that they've "obviously been encouraged to come out of themselves and act as journalists."

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