Nine University of Colorado at 葫芦娃视频 students will be honored at an April 16 banquet as the winners of the fourth annual Western American Writing Awards presented by the university's Center of the American West.
R. Todd Laugen, Jayme Catalano, W. Austin Arensberg and David Isaac Stonehill each will receive $350 first-prize awards. Elizabeth Marglin, Jay D. Rumisek, Serena Chopra, Susan Coley Huth and Sarah Hoffman each will receive honorable mention awards of $100.
"Among students and faculty, the University of Colorado has an extraordinary area of strength in Western American Studies," said history Professor Patricia Limerick, faculty director of the Center of the American West. "This celebration of the talent of young people is a high point of the year for us. Writing well about this region is one of the most important forms of public service."
Eighteen judges brought a wide range of expertise and experience to the contest from areas such as ecology and evolutionary biology to theatre and dance. Entries were judged on the merits of their writing style and on the relevance of their content to the study of the American West. Contestants were anonymous to the judges; names were removed from the entries prior to judging.
The contest has more than doubled in popularity since its first year attracted just 40 entries. This year's contest had a record total of 120 entries. The winners were named in five categories: graduate nonfiction, graduate creative, undergraduate creative, undergraduate nonfiction and undergraduate poetry.
Laugen, the graduate winner in the nonfiction category, is a doctoral candidate in history. Laugen won with his essay on "Western Workers, Private Power and the Public Interest: The Denver Tramway Crisis and Postwar American Politics."
Rumisek, a graduate student in law, and Marglin, a graduate student in journalism, both received honorable mentions in the graduate creative and graduate nonfiction categories, respectively. Rumisek won for his graduate creative work "In the Corner," and Marglin won for her essay on "Poetry on the Range: A Closer Look at Some Colorado Poets."
In the undergraduate categories, students with three different majors won first-prize awards. Catalano, a junior in the department of English won first place with her piece titled "Brenna" in the undergraduate creative category; Arensberg, a sophomore in environmental studies took first place in nonfiction for his essay titled "Seeds of Doubt: An Analysis of Cloud Seeding and Its Implications on Western U.S. Law;" and Stonehill, a senior in the media studies program, won first place in the undergraduate poetry category for his poem "An Old American Tale of the Buffalo Ghost."
Chopra, a freshman dance and sociology major; and Huth, a senior history major, both received honorable mentions for their works "Rhythms" and "The Crying Bird Chronicles - A Short Story," respectively, in the undergraduate creative category. Hoffman, a senior linguistics major, received an honorable mention for her essay "Cultural Pride in the Context of Language Maintenance: Hispanics in New Mexico" in the undergraduate nonfiction category.
The selected works will be archived on the 葫芦娃视频 campus at the Center of the American West in Macky Auditorium, room 229, and also will be posted on the center's Web site.
Funding for the writing contest was provided by donors. For more information call the Center of the American West at (303) 735-1399 or visit .