The winning essay for this year’s English Academic Writing Award, “Beats Vs. Squares: America’s Second Civil War” is by Sophia Galvez. Sophia is a senior graduating this spring with a Bachelor’s degree in English and minors in Journalism and Sports Communication. Within the English Department, she is an active member of the English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta. On campus, she is a sister of Alpha Omicron Pi as well as an assistant news editor at the school’s student run newspaper, The Outlook. After graduation, she plans to return to her hometown of Miami, FL to follow her interests in sports journalism and broadcasting. An infectious, engaging foray into new historicist interpretation, “Beats Vs. Squares” reads Allen Ginsberg’s anthemic 1959 poem “America” in the context of the cultural wars it emerged from: the beats’ and squares’ battle for the soul of postwar America. One of the joys of this essay is Sophia’s fluency with documentary and archival evidence: using contemporary journalistic accounts and interviews she weaves a rich tapestry of a fascinating period and captures the beats in all their spiritual, quixotic, proudly profane, and deeply American voices.

The winner of this year’s English Creative Writing Award is Melanie Broman. Her submission “Gutenberg” is an intelligent and sharp piece of mystery fiction. It’s both an homage to the great locked-in mysteries of Agatha
Christie and to those who live for books. In “Gutenberg,” some people even die for them. Melanie Broman first discovered her love of mystery writing while taking the First Year Seminar course, “Detective Fiction,” as an undeclared major. This soon led to choosing to study English Creative Writing. Melanie hopes to inspire a love for reading (specifically mysteries!) in others, which she has done through her contributions to Sigma Tau Delta’s annual “Blind Date with a Book” series. She plans to continue mystery writing in the future, along with adding to her collection of Agatha Christie novels, which she picks up at used bookstores in every city she visits.

Generously sponsored by English Department Professor Emerita and former Department Chair Dr. Caryl Sills, the teaching award in her name recognizes English-Education majors who have exhibited both laudable academic success and profound promise as future educators. This year’s enthusiastically selected winner is senior Nicole Ondrof. Nicole is a member of Kappa Delta Pi (the International Honors Society in Education) and our own Sigma Tau Delta, which she has served actively in a leadership role as the philanthropy chair. In addition, she serves the Honors School Association’s Executive Board in the role of academic chair. Her involvement in the Honors School allowed her to spend her junior year writing an undergraduate honors thesis in both Education and English. Through this thesis project, “Self-Directed Learning in the Secondary Classroom,” she researched, and eventually implemented, self-directed learning and student choice into an English curriculum that maintains the current New Jersey standards for Language Arts in teaching and learning at the secondary level. Building on this impressively early development of her own pedagogy, Nicole plans to apply for jobs in English Secondary Education while hoping, in the more distant future, to pursue either an M.A. in English or a Master of Science in Educational Counseling.

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