And the Winner Is.. Part Two
So, the fiction contest winners are in and published, what happened to the non-fiction side of the contest?
It took a little longer than expected for the non-fiction judges to come to a decision, largely because of e-mail issues, but a decision has been made. The category for the non-fiction side, in case you forgot, was Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at AU. This is, as you might imagine, a sensitive topic.
Fortunately, we had some expert judges available to look at the entries and choose.
Starting with Dr. Reinekke Lengelle, an assistant professor with Athabasca University in Canada and a senior researcher with The Hague University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. She is the author of the book Writing the Self in Bereavement: A story of love, spousal loss, and bereavement (Routledge, 2021) and has written more than 35 scholarly articles and book chapters. Her career began as a poet, playwright, and writing teacher. In the past 15 years, she has worked as a professor and codeveloper of the Career Writing method, which uses creative, expressive, and reflective writing to foster career identity development and agency. She is a symposium co-editor with the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling and led the development of two issues on the use of Creative Methods in research and professional practice, published in 2018 and 2020, respectively. You can find out more about Reinekke’s work at www.writingtheself.ca.
Also judging was Dr. Michael Lithgow, an assistant professor in communication studies with AU, and the steward for the Writing in New Media focus area in the MA-IS program. He’s also been a community radio and television producer and freelance writer, with articles in the Canadian Journal of Communication, and a collection of poetry called Waking in the Tree House, published in 2012.
Finally, AU’s own current writer in residence, Joshua Whitehead was the third on the panel, and you can read more about him at his own website: https://www.joshuawhitehead.ca/about.
Between the three of them, they selected Jason Hazel-Rah Sullivan for his entry Would the Real Hazel Please Stand Up; Wait, Where Is She?, about the confusion being named “Hazel-rah” brought to his childhood, and Anne Ndegwa for Helen, an essay about the Botanical Gardens of Silver Springs and the benefits that inclusion has brought to it.
We also drew five random winners from the almost 40 entrants, each receiving a $100 Amazon gift card. So, congratulations to Jason K., Bronywn A., Eli E., Kaisha N., and Marcus L., those gift cards should be sent out soon to the lucky draw winners.
Meanwhile, this week in the Voice Magazine is the first in a long time that we haven’t had a student interview ready. If you’ve been reading the student interviews but haven’t shared your story yet, why not drop me a line at voice@voicemagazine.org so we can set something up. You’ll get a bit of swag, and your fellow students will get to read about someone really interesting: you.
Enjoy the read!
