Roy F. Powell writing-award winners announced

March 20, 2014

The Department of Writing and Linguistics at Georgia Southern University recently presented the 2014 Roy F. Powell Awards for Creative Writing to Cady Ennis, Amanda Malone, and Sarah Fonesca. Each student received $100 and a framed certificate and will be recognized at the University’s Honors Day on April 2. The winning works will also be published in Miscellany, the campus Arts magazine

 Cady took top honors in the Poetry Division for “[to my brown eyes on the piano bench: hung like so many men],” “Steal the Lines of Other Poets” and “Evening is best worn off-white.” James Devlin, Christina Martinez and Yavaria Ryan received honorable mentions.

Amanda won the Fiction Division for her story “The Trick to Knots,” and  Yavaria Ryan, Taylor Tyson, and Jeff Licciardello received honorable mentions.

The Creative Nonfiction prize went to Sarah for “The Trouble with Water.” Jordan Taylor, Taylor Tyson, and Yavaria Ryan received honorable mention.

Winning manuscripts were chosen from several highly competitive submissions, according to creative writing faculty judges Emma Bolden, poetry; Jared Sexton, fiction; and Theresa Welford, creative nonfiction.

Cady, a senior from Mount Vernon, Ga., is a writing and linguistics major and says her work has been influenced by writers such George R.R. Martin, Jane Austen, Audrey Niffenegger, D.A. Powell, Ernest Hemingway and J.K. Rowling.

Cady submitted “a series of poems thrilling in even the smallest moment: Every word, every phrase, every line break, every space, seemed perfectly picked to resonate with each other and create richly textured poetic landscapes,” said Bolden.

Amanda is from Garrison, N.Y., and is working to obtain an English major with a minor in writing. Raymond Carver and Larry Brown are her literary influences.

“What I admire about this piece is the economy, the way each sentence is chiseled and chock-full of meaning,” said Sexton of Amanda’s submission. “The effect is a story that seems, at first glance, a calm and tranquil narrative about youthful exploration, but upon further examination reveals a dense and troubling undertow that threatens to drown a family that’s just barely staying afloat.”

Sarah Fonseca is a writing and gender studies student from Lincolnton, Ga. She is a Lambda Literary fellow, and her work has appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Thought Catalog, and Autostraddle. She likes dental floss, taking things literally, and “tricking people into having chill conversations about heavy subjects.”

Creative nonfiction judge Theresa Welford noted that Sarah’s “braided essay is like a sequence of lyric poems, immersing readers in meditative thoughts and vivid sensory details.”

For more information, contact the Department of Writing and Linguistics at 912-478-0739.

The Department of Writing and Linguistics is housed in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. CLASS, the University’s College of the Creative Mind, prepares students to achieve academic excellence, develop their analytical skills, enhance their creativity, and embrace their responsibilities as citizens of their communities, their nations, and the world.