Our Spring 2021 Ann Fields Award & Tillie Olsen Prize Winners!

Creative Writing would like to congratulate the winners of the Ann Field Award and of the Tillie Olsen Prize for Spring 2021.

The winner of the Ann Fields Award is Quinn Fairchild. Congratulations Quinn! Judge Keith Donnell had this to say about the work:

The poem, “Garlic,” selected as the recipient of this year’s Anne Fields Poetry Award, explores the sensual and the static, the natural and the supernatural. In this poem, the central object functions as a through line toward meaning, a stake, anchoring the work in an inner landscape of creative agency. “Garlic” is a poem that thoughtfully challenges its reader, building a doorway to truth—that timeless doorway that all readers must enter on their own.

The winner of the 2021 Tillie Olsen Prize is Angelina Tolbert! Congratulations Angelina!

Angelina Tolbert's first two-act play HIGH YELLA echoes back to the time of early Greek drama when the theatre was a home of taboos.  This emerging writer's voice is refreshing provocative, dangerous, and necessary.  Angelina has a finely tuned ear for the poetry of the human voice in all its unmasked logic and perspective.  From the moment the lights come up on this living room family drama to the final moment of the protest heard from outside the window, the audience is uncomfortable yet captivated, and cannot turn away from the truth of what is said, though, and felt about race within the Black community and the Black community’s historical experience in America all the way to this day.  And all I can say is Sophocles would love this.