Yale undergraduates have scored a trifecta this year, taking the top three prizes in the "non-fiction" category of the Atlantic Monthly magazine's Student Writing Contest.
Jialu Chen '11, Isaac Arnsdorf '11 and Alice Baumgartner '10 took first, second and third place, respectively, in the annual competition. Both Chen and Baumgartner originally wrote their pieces for classes taught by Anne Fadiman, the Francis Writer-in-Residence, while Arnsdorf's was written for the Yale Daily News.
In addition, two of the seven students awarded honorable mention by the magazine in the Nonfiction category this year were also from Yale: Laura Marie Gottesdiener '10 and Emily Appelbaum '10. Both originally wrote their pieces for classes taught by Fred Strebeigh, senior lecturer in the Department of English and the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.
There was also another Yale winner in this year's Atlantic Monthly contest: Kate Orazem '12, who took second place in the Poetry category.
While Yale students have won in every category since the magazine began the contest, they have made a particularly strong showing in the non-fiction category. Six of the 13 first-place winners have been from Yale, as have 15 of the 39 winners of the top three prizes, and 39 of all 120 prize winners, including honorable mentions.
Twenty five of these prizes have been for works written in Strebeigh's non-fiction writing courses.
In addition, two of this year's winners, Gottesdiener and Baumgartner, were among the six students named as finalists or semifinalists in the inaugural Norman Mailer National College Awards. (Gottesdiener was a finalist, along with Jerry Guo '09, and Baumgartner was a semi-finalist, along with Anthony Lydgate '10, Aditi Ramakrishnan '09 and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin '11.)
Arnsdorf also won first place in the 2009 Rolling Stone College Journalism Competition, which boasted two Yale first-prize winners in 2008 and 2007. In recent years, Yale student writers have also been winners or finalists in the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest, the Nation Student Writing Contest and The New York Times Magazine College Essay Contest.
"[A] case could be made that the writing of Yale students is achieving a level of national recognition exceeding that for any other university," wrote Strebeigh and Fadiman in a recent note to their colleagues. "High levels of awards to undergraduate writers have come in the same years that Yale has developed the new Writing Concentration within the English department, the new Yale College Writing Center, and the new Yale Journalism Initiative - all of which interact with the invaluable culture of student-edited campus publications, for which most of the award winners have been writers."