The Judging Committee for the 2022 Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes is pleased to announce this year’s winners.
This was a particularly strong year for submissions, and the judges were impressed by the quality of the collections and the presentations made by the collectors. All of this year’s finalists are to be congratulated on their diligence and eloquence.
This year’s Senior Prize was awarded to Will Twomey of Silliman College for his collection “American 20th-Century Military History.” Senior Second Prize was awarded to Alex McGrath of Branford College for his collection “National and Subnational Legislatures.” Senior Honorable Mentions were awarded to Gabrielle Colangelo of Branford College for her collection “Lesbian Life Writing in Theory and Practice,” and Ryan Sandler of Jonathan Edwards College for his collection “Strengthening American Education.”
Two Sophomore First Prizes were awarded. Charnice Hoegnifioh of Benjamin Franklin College received First Prize for her collection “The Paradigms of American Girlhood throughout United States History,” and Bilal Moin of Grace Hopper College received First Prize for his collection “Sovereignty, Subterfuge, and the Indian Statesperson.” Sophomore Second Prize was awarded to Awuor Onguru of Berkeley College for her collection “Africa Writing, Writing Africa: A Survey of Continental Post-Colonial Literature.”
Sophomore Honorable Mentions were awarded to Jacob Eldred of Morse College for his collection “Railways in the Landscape and Imaginations,” Yuhan Kim of Berkeley College for his collection “Military History with a Focus on the Napoleonic Wars,” and Alice Mao of Morse College for her collection, “Beauty in Form and Content: Artist Books, Indie Zines, and Miniature Notebooks.”
For more than half a century, student bibliophiles have been receiving prizes for the quality of their book collections, thanks to the generosity of Yale alumnus Adrian Van Sinderen (Class of 1910). In 1957 Mr. Van Sinderen established two prizes, for Yale seniors and sophomores, in order to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build up libraries of their own, and read for pleasure and learning.
In 2002 an annual poster competition was added, awarding a prize to the winning designer of the poster used to announce the book-collecting competition. Sidney L. Hirschman ’22 of Jonathan Edwards College was selected as the winning designer in this year’s poster competition. Second prize was awarded to Avery Mitchell ’23 of Trumbull College. Joji Baratelli ’24 of Jonathan Edwards College and Meshach Cornelius ’22 of Ezra Stiles College were awarded honorable mentions.
Judges for this year’s competition:
Adam Abbate, Joseph Agostini ’93, Elena Castro ’23, Molly Dotson, Basie Gitlin ’10 (co-chair), Rebecca Martz, Miko McGinty ’93, mfa ’98 (co-chair), and E.C. Schroeder
