Judges' Comments

Two essays tied for first prize: Sophia Angus’ essay, “Imagining Storm in the Mountains,” written for Barbara Lynn-Davis’s course, WRIT 107: Introduction to the Histories of Art, and Emily Lu’s essay, “Reflections on Grief, Remembrance, and Race in Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Facing It,” written for Jeannine Johnson’s course, WRIT 144: What’s in A Name? Investigating What We Call People, Places, and Things.

The judges agreed to award two prizes in this round of awards due to the high quality of both pieces, and also because they reflect the variability and scope of first-year writing at Wellesley. The two essays tied for first place together represent different ways of combining the personal and reflective with the public and analytical. The judges found them, individually and as a pair, to demonstrate well the possibilities of the essay form in the acutely challenging days of 2020.

We picked Sophia Angus’ essay, “Imagining Storm in the Mountains,” for its sharp, funny, and subtle take on a great assignment that’s a little off the beaten path of the typical academic essay. Sophia, from her quarantine desk at home, imagines driving into an Alfred Bierstadt landscape. Her writing excels on all counts of what good writing entails: it possesses terrific detail, elegant structure, and a real voice that brings everything together. It also contains sentences that feel truly shaped, such as, “I’m cemented to my desk chair, my eyes are straining to focus on my computer screen, staring at a painting that somehow captures my not-really-regretful feelings of regret for moments past when I didn’t stop the car to look, to pause, to feel, to smell.” The reader gets a wonderful feel for the Bierstadt painting, but also for Sophia’s own lively, thoughtful, and moving quarantine-scape.

Emily Lu’s essay, “Reflections on Grief, Remembrance, and Race in Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Facing It,’” interrogates Komunyakaa’s poem about visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by focusing on his engagement with the memorial’s reflective surface. Lu’s incisiveness allows for a rich and insightful reading of the poem’s tensions and contradictions – how Komunyakaa’s contemplation of his “distorted reflection” expresses a complex ambivalence about being a Black veteran of the war. The argument is beautifully articulated, and Lu does a graceful job interweaving an analysis of Komunyakaa’s reception of the memorial with Maya Lin’s own statements about her intentions in its design. The reader comes away moved and unsettled by the question of what it means for Komunyakaa to mourn the war.