Robert Wright/Andreas GA

Congratulations to the winners of the 2009 Robert Wright Awards (with comments from the judge, Leigh Allison Wilson):

First Place - Amanda Schumacher (fiction/creative nonfiction)

Judge's comments: "Whether Amanda Schumacher is writing fiction or nonfiction, she is an author who investigates the mysterious interstices between life and death, mystery and manners.  That she does this with a fine intelligence and originality makes her prose a memorable experience for her readers."

Second Place - Lesley Arimah (fiction)

Judge's comments: "Lesley Arimah's fiction takes characters in extreme situations and, somehow, renders their emotional states into feelings we all recognize as a mirror to our own.  These shocks of recognition occur whether Arimah is writing about the adult grief from losing a child, or the child grief from the manipulations from a horrendous mother."

Third Place - Heather Elliott (poetry)

Judge's comments: "Heather Elliott is a poet who clearly loves language and often regrets its slippery meanings.  She is, in other words, a poet's poet and the range she shows in these twelve poems both delights and sobers her readers.

Honorable Mention - Seth Calvert (creative nonfiction)

Judge's comments: "Ancient Greek may well be 'hard' but it is equally hard to write an intelligent contemporary English essay about learning it.  The wit and humor of this piece meshes astonishingly well with the arcane complexities of what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'that brutal seductress' of a language, Greek."

Also, let's here it for the 2009 Nadine B. Andreas Graduate Assistant: Jorge Evans.

Well done!