Graduate Awards Spring 2024

Robert H. West Award: Outstanding Graduate Student in Literary Criticism and Creative Writing 

Named in honor of Robert H. West, former department head and faculty member, this fund supports the work of outstanding graduate students.

Literary Criticism Winner: Emily Beckwith

Creative Writing Winner: Sayantika Mandal

Emily and Sayantika

Emily recently defended her dissertation, "The Affordances of Liminal Places: Wales and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel," and her critical work has appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. After graduation in May, she's spending three weeks walking Offa's Dyke Path in the UK and will finally get to explore Wales in person after dedicating so much time to reading, thinking, and writing about it.

Sayantika is the inaugural Graduate Arts Lab Fellow and a PhD Candidate in the Creative Writing Program. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in december Magazine, Ecobloomspaces Anthology, Glassworks Magazine, Southern Review of Books, Indian Literature, The Citron Review, Cerebration, Feminism in India, Times of India, and others. She is currently working on her first novel Driftwood.

The Christy Desmet Memorial Fund

Named in honor of faculty member Dr. Christy Desmet, Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of English and Director of the FYC/UGA Writing Center, this fund will support graduate students working in British Literature prior to 1900.

Winners: Spencer Doss, Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson, Johannah Bailie, and Mounawar Abbouchi

Desmet Winners

Spencer is a second-year MA student; her studies center around British literature of the long nineteenth century, with a focus on Victorian women writers and the interventions of aesthetic and medical ideologies in the novel. After graduating, Spencer will be pursuing a PhD in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jessica is an MA student who researches 19th-century women writers' involvement in the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement. She hopes to one day return to Italy–or "the Mother Country," as Christina Rossetti called it–and spend the rest of her days whimsically writing about the human condition.

Mounawar is a PhD student working on feminine anger, adaptation, and translation in Late Medieval Literature.

Robert E. Park Essay Award 

Established by the Class of 1912 in honor of Robert E. Park, former head of English, this fund supports a prize given each year to the author of the best essay written for a graduate course in the Department of English.

Tina Borah

Winner: Tina Borah

Tina is a second-year graduate student at the Department of English, UGA. While she now resides in Athens, Georgia, as an international student pursuing a Ph.D., she was born in Assam and lived most of her adult life in Delhi, India. Apart from researching and reading, she teaches at the Department of English as a First Year Writing Instructor. Her research areas include postcolonial studies, migration literature, ecocriticism, third culture theory, and Anglophone literature from the Global South.

Patricia J. and Hubert H. McAlexander Graduate Award in American Literature

Named in honor of emeritus professors Drs. Hubert and Patricia McAlexander, this award recognizes outstanding work in the fields of Canadian and/or United States literature.

Winner: Hannah Warren

Hannah authored the poetry collection Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (Sundress 2024) and two chapbooks. Recent critical work includes an article on gendered visions of the apocalypse in SF television and a forthcoming article on Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men as a rhizomatic epic.

Calvin S. Brown and Edwin M. Everett Award

Named in honor of Calvin S. Brown and Edwin Everett, former UGA faculty members, this fund supports graduate student travel to scholarly and professional meetings.

Winner: O. Jeremiah Agba O-Jeremiah Agbaakin . akin

O-Jeremiah is the author of The Sign of the Ram (APBF/Akashic Books, 2023), selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani for the New Generation African Poets Chapbook series. He holds an MFA from University of Mississippi and is a first-year PhD student in Creative Writing at University of Georgia, Athens.

The Alice C. Langdale Graduate Awards in English

Named in honor of alumna Alice C. Langdale, this fund supports awards that recognize the outstanding work of graduate students within the Department of English.

Winners: Zach Anderson, Mikaela Warner, Hannah Warren, and Christina Wood

Langdale Award Winners

Zachary holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and is currently a PhD candidate in the Creative Writing Program at UGA. His chapbook The Outlaw, The Red Ghost, Half-Lives, a Photogram Exposed by the Dirt was published in 2021 by The Magnificent Field. His book reviews and critical writings appear in Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and the Action Books blog. His poems have recently been featured in Fairy Tale Review, New Delta Review, Dreginald, and Denver Quarterly.

Mikaela defended her dissertation this spring titled Henry VIII and Disability Studies and presented her research as a finalist at the UGA's Three Minute Thesis competion. She is a proud member of UGA's union, the United Campus Workers of Georgia.

Hannah authored the poetry collection Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (Sundress 2024) and two chapbooks. Recent critical work includes an article on gendered visions of the apocalypse in SF television and a forthcoming article on Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men as a rhizomatic epic.

Christina is a PhD candidate and fiction writer with short stories appearing in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and other journals. Her story “The Astronaut” won the 2018 Shirley Jackson Award and her novel-in-progress won a 2023 Writer of Note grant from the de Groot Foundation.

Michael G. Moran English Graduate Award

Named in honor of Michael G. Moran, former UGA faculty member and department head.

Winners: Abhijit Sarmah, Grace Huff, and Saurabh Anand

Moran Winners

Abhijit is a second-year PhD student in the Creative Writing Program at UGA. His work is published in magazines like Poetry, The Margins and Lincoln Review.

Grace is a first-year MA student in the English department concentrating in rhetoric and composition. Her research interest is in examining the rhetoric of health and medicine, influenced by her Bachelor’s degree in psychology. In her free time, she loves spending time with her friends, family, and cat.

Saurabh is an assistant director of the University of Georgia Writing Center, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition Studies in the Department of English. His research interests include autoethnography, writing centers in multilingual contexts, and decolonial writing center pedagogies.

Jane Appleby Fellowship in English

Named in honor of Jane Appleby, this fellowship supports graduate study in the Department of English.

Winners: Chanara Andrews-Bickers, Chelsea Cobb, Genevieve Guzmán, and Safeer Hussain

Appleby

Chanara serves as Assistant Director of the Willis Center for Writing and President of UGA's Graduate and Professional Scholars (GAPS). Chanara is interested in contemporary African American Literature and Culture, and has earned a graduate certificate in the Institute for African American Studies. Her research examines the centrality of care in Black women's reading and writing communities.

Chelsea's writing has won the Margaret Harvin Wilson Writing Award and was nominated as a finalist at the Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival. Her writings can be found in Stillpoint Literary Magazine, The Spectacle, Rappahannock Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, and elsewhere

This summer with the support of an Appleby award for doctoral research, CWP PhD candidate Genevieve will draft the critical introduction to their creative dissertation on the disabled feminist grotesque in poetry of the last hundred years.

Graduate Awards Spring 2024