Utah State University Creative Writing and Art Contest Announces 2020 Winners
March 23, 2020
The Utah State University Creative Writing and Art Contest has named the winners in its 27th annual competition, recognizing the best creative work by USU students. Open to all USU undergraduate and graduate students from all departments and disciplines, the contest awards top writers of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, as well as visual artists in drawing, painting and photography. Each category received the blind review of expert judges drawn from the USU and Cache Valley arts community.
Winners this year ranged from across campus, demonstrating the strength and vibrancy of the USU arts and writing community. The contest received submissions from over twenty different majors and from all eight undergraduate colleges.
Judge Brock Dethier was especially impressed with the versatility of the graduate submissions, which “demonstrated beautifully the variety possible in good poetry. The top two entries were as different as Dickinson and Whitman, one offering carefully crafted, tight gems, the other expansive narratives full of charming voice.”
This is the fourth year the contest has partnered with USU’s new, international undergraduate literary journal, Sink Hollow. The winning entries will be published in April in a special contest issue, giving this work an international audience.
2020 USU CREATIVE WRITING AND ART CONTEST WINNERS
ART WINNERS
Undergraduate
- FIRST: Michelle Hartvigsen, Trompe L'oeil
- SECOND: Nikki Christensen, Dragon
- THIRD: Amy Larsen, Walking on Water
HONORABLE MENTION: Amber Healey, Broken Light #4; Michelle Hartvigsen, Back Again, Another Life, Despondent, Window View; Nikki Christensen, Desert Snow, Forgotten Spring; Amy Larsen, Bomagotchi girl, Reflection of Field Worker
Graduate
- FIRST: Andrew Romriell, Children of the World
HONORABLE MENTION: Andrew Romriell, Into the Mountain, Spiraling, Swift, Winter Mists
FICTION WINNERS
Undergraduate
- FIRST: Justyn Hardy, In the Narrows South of Thayne
- SECOND: Madison Silva, Good Will
- THIRD: Claire Atwood, Take Once a Day
Graduate
- FIRST: Niyonta Nahia Chowdhury-Magaña, Brickland Redgreen
- SECOND: Andrew Romriell, An Easy, 10-Step Guide to Painting Addiction
- THIRD: Tyler Hurst, The Processor
NONFICTION WINNERS
Undergraduate
- FIRST: Marie Skinner, Slant Etymology
- SECOND: Amrutha Obulasetty, The Best Shade of Brown
- THIRD: Madison Silva, Conversion
Graduate
- FIRST: Andrew Romriell, A Re-established Poetic Dictionary of the Voiceless
- SECOND: Alyssa Witbeck Alexander, Starved
- THIRD: Kelsie Peterson, Rites of Passage
POETRY WINNERS
Undergraduate
- FIRST: Justyn Hardy, Losing Virginity, Wyoming, My Thirty-Aught-Six
- SECOND: Jordan Forest, Grief, The Wicked Witch is Dead, Oracle Bones
- THIRD: Jacob Taylor, Doctor, All the Ones I Cannot Love, This is Me
Graduate
- FIRST: Britt Allen, Mastectomy, January, Domesticated
- SECOND: Niyonta Nahia Chowdhury-Magaña, Dinner Time: Kurigram, 1971, Goodnight Sweetheart, How to Kill a Brown Mouse
- THIRD: Andrew Romriell, 3am Considerations, I Like to Sweep, When he asks How are you?