Annual Awards & Prizes

Sacred Conservation: Traditional Ecological and Spiritual Knowledge of the Amazonian Kĩsêdjê, Kayapó, and Kawaiwete Peoples
Faculty Sponsor: Jesse Horst

For their essay: Agroecology and the Repeasantization of Global and Local Food Systems
Faculty Sponsor: An Li

For their essay: Yo Soy Mi Isla: The Fictional Cuba of Wendy Guerra (Revolutions in Cuba)
Faculty Sponsor: Jesse Horst

“La Tortuga y la Lluvia,” a short story for children, originally written in Spanish, translated into English and illustrated by the author

Faculty Sponsor: Eduardo Lago

Olaf is an extremely focused and original artists. His paintings, drawings, and sculptures straddle the line between form, function, and narrative. His work is inventively strange and funny with a formal rigor that is rare for someone with such diverse interests. –John O’Connor, Faculty in Visual and Studio Arts 

A resident of Chesapeake, VA, Nicholle Chew came to Sarah Lawrence with interests in Environmental Studies and Dance.  During her first year, she discovered a passion for Organic Chemistry and changed the focus of her studies accordingly.  Since that time, Nicholle has taken a great variety of Physical Science and Environmental Studies courses.  She has also pursued many leadership initiatives within the science community at Sarah Lawrence, including acting as the president of the SLC Chapter of the American Chemical Society and co-chair of the STEMming Women student group. Since her sophomore year, Nicholle has also been one of the organizers of the SciMath Poster Symposium, and has tutored for several chemistry classes. She also served on search committees for faculty hires in Biology, Environmental Science, and Physics.  Since last summer, Nicholle has undertaken chemistry research under the supervision of Professor Patrick Holland at Yale University as part of her Senior Thesis work.  Nicholle has been accepted into the chemistry graduate program of Indiana University, Bloomington where she will be conducting research in the field of catalysis towards her PhD.  –Colin Abernethy, Faculty in Chemistry 

View Nicholle's Work

• Sample 1
• Sample 2

A silver 2009 Ford passenger van outfitted to be a home and an artists’ studio has been Oliver’s Sarah Lawrence this covid year. Sleeping in truck stops and parking lots, he has diligently pursued his course work while simultaneously photographing and eloquently writing about “the much-erased history of Chinese migrant laborers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, from the gold miners of the Sierras, to the railroad workers of the Rocky Mountains, to the plantation workers along the Mississippi River.”  His photographs are quiet, thoughtful, and ultimately brilliant. In our sad epoch of prejudice and violence towards persons of perceived Asian origins, the book that Oliver is humbly and bravely creating will surely be a work of art, writing, and understanding. – Joel Sternfeld, Faculty in Photography

Anahat is a junior at Sarah Lawrence who has concentrated her studies around molecular biology and neuroscience. After her sophomore year, she worked remotely with Cecilia Toro in the SLC Summer Science program and studied current research about sensory hair cells. The following summer, Anahat received a Suzanne Arkin externship award to perform neurobiology research in the lab of Dr. Stephanie Rudolph at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. This school year, she has continued to work with Dr. Rudolph--investigating the role of oxytocin in the cerebellum--through independent field work, and she will use the Lipkin Science Prize to continue her research at Einstein during the summer of 2022. Through this work, Anahat is learning many cutting edge techniques in neurobiology, including how to work with laboratory rodents, perform molecular and cellular investigations of neuronal gene and protein expression, and analyze confocal microscope images. Anahat has a stellar academic record, and we believe that the Lipkin Science Prize will enable her to be a competitive candidate when she applies for PhD programs in neuroscience after graduating from Sarah Lawrence. – The Ian Lipkin ’74 Science Prize Committee: Colin Abernethy, Merideth Frey, Bernice Rosenzweig and Cecilia Toro

Bella Phelan’s terrific paper identifies a critical connection between two Middle English works on female spirituality, Seinte Margarete and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. Integrating research on late medieval mysticism and martyrology with persuasive close readings of interconnected spatial images, such as the prison, the anchoritic cell, and the maternal womb, Bella’s essay demonstrates how Seinte Margarete and the Revelations link the representation of enclosure to the potential for divine encounter. It reflects Bella’s strong foundation in the medieval literary and spiritual traditions and her keen perception of conceptual continuities across texts. – Gillian Adler, Literature Faculty, and Roy Ben-Shai, Philosophy Faculty

Corinne Rottger’s impressive paper highlights the complex interplay between identity, subjectivity, and reputation in Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, discerning the fascination with interiority and identity construction in the twelfth-century literary imagination. Approaching the narratives of Lancelot and Yvain with theoretical sophistication and subtle close readings, Corinne’s essay demonstrates how the omissions and acts of naming contribute to a broader dialectic between the knights’ public and private lives, proliferating or deconstructing their identities. The attention to narrative time, including the shifting temporalities of Chrétien’s plots, further emphasizes Corinne’s grasp of narratology and the ways in which modern theories can disclose the richness of medieval texts. – Gillian Adler, Literature Faculty, and Roy Ben-Shai, Philosophy Faculty

"For his ability to provoke complex emotions by examining the subject of human mortality through the lens of wildly comic, hilariously funny situations and characters, the Lipkin Playwriting Prize goes to Andrew Del Vecchio." –The Sarah Lawrence Theatre Faculty

Emma DeNaples’s poems render the often un-renderable complexity of human relationships, and they do so with a wonderfully unsettling forthrightness and ease (“My mother is a very fervent sort of person. / She folds me over. She tucks me up into the cupboard.”). These poems make beautiful our curious human condition of embodiment (“My hair is a seam down my spine.”; “I will be lessened piece by piece until / I am only a ribcage, I am just my rib”). I am in awe of DeNaples’s sophisticated attention to sound, image, and sense at this stage in her career, and I can’t wait to see where her work goes next. – Stacy Gnall, Judge

• Poem 1: Eyelash, Promise, Two Dimes
• Poem 2: Crowning Bower
• Poem 3: Backwoods Matrimony

The poem "Eat" accomplishes so much technically without making you aware that's happening; it's in and of the body and senses while formally it's cut into parts like "a mango, a quart of strawberries, a difficult bag of flour." The body is also being parsed, transformed, and it's shifting through time, from the "I" into the "we," the eyes suddenly floating, the face disappearing -- its penultimate section ending, "You did not see/ the shape that I took,/ though your hands/ stilled around me." – Chessy Normile, Judge

The recipient of the Greta Minsky Prize for 2022 is awarded to a student who surpasses the duties of a stage manager, taking the organization and care of a creative project to new heights. She makes her collaborators feel welcome and safe, always one step ahead. This student has worked hard on many projects from mainstage musicals, to Downstage shows, to independent student group productions. Not only is she a kind, patient, thoughtful, and meticulous stage manager, but she has also devoted herself to SLCTheatre as a production assistant, designer, and crew member.  She is, above all else, full of care and positivity- an absolute joy to work with! We are full of gratitude for this recipient's contributions to the theatre program. We are pleased to present the Greta Minsky Prize for 2022 to Jamie Chen.–Caden Manson, Director, Theatre Program

The language and storytelling in “Writer’s Block” are clear as glass, propulsive, and deceptively straightforward. The layering of Violet’s desires and underachieved ambitions builds and shifts to reveal a fully realized character in the world. The quotidian repetitions and stories within the story of her days (a painting of changing meaning she stares at when in her room, the novel she tries to write) give the narrative a vital humor. Even (or especially) when Violet is superficial, her story has depth. I was reminded of a passage from Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, where the writer discovers a “…greater understanding of others in their self-deception…nobody is the person he thinks he is…his misapprehension is universal, elementary, and…casts on people… the soft gleam of the comical.” The recognition that “he is like those he despises leads us to see everyone, himself included, haloed by a tender gleam of irony,” and that this is the writer’s (and I would add, reader’s) “precious reward.”  – Judge Sophie McManus

“Resistance Letter” is elegiac, atmospheric, and lyrical, somehow deeply intimate and anonymous at once. This story bends the form. It is a story, but conveys so much—the entire evolution of a young love from beginning to end—in such few, vivid strokes, that it gathers into a rhythm of loss and possibility, and stayed with me long after, in the way a poem does, in surprising flashes of picture and meaning. Like many great poems of sorrow and grief, “Resistance Letter” transforms loss into beauty without allowing our memory of the loss to fade, and holds room for the future, too. – Judge Sophie McManus

For working with the Mary Mitchell Center re: food availability/food justice in the Bronx

For writing workshops with low-income women.

To complete his film on West Salt Lake City, the redlined community where he grew up.

• Old King Coal Project Proposal
• Proposal

Elijah Burger’s “We Come From” is a stunning poem of contemplation, connection, being, and belonging. There is such strength in softness and subtlety here (“that wind through my body at my first synagogue”). This is an open, honest, asking voice (“How can I let her go when she comes in from the cold, hands red and tears stinging?”; “Oh mother, an aching too tender to touch”). Burger’s poem is a beautiful slow burn rising to a final, triumphant crescendo (“we a coming continuous we an ever tumbling coming from a right now we waking up to say / hineinu hineinu hineinu.”). This is a poem I want to read again and again. This is a poet I certainly want to read more of. – Judge Stacy Gnall

Emma Cameron’s “The Posture of Ophelia (amputated from Shakespeare. He does not own girls floating down creeks)” had me at its title. Cameron’s is a powerful voice that demands attention, and I am an eager audience. I relished in being instructed by this voice (“To float on your back, you must first inflate your belly.”) and in learning from this voice (“To move you must first imitate a chicken, then the letter T, and finally a soldier.”). And I was moved by hearing what I never knew yet have always felt to be true (“our girlhood/learning how to sit, how to talk, how to hold our body still / in its thin red cast.). Cameron’s voice will demand readers’ attentions long into the future, I'm sure of it. – Judge Stacy Gnall