Three Baruch College Students Win 2020 Harman Fiction Contest Awards
June 5, 2020
From top left: Esther Allen, Director, Harman Writer-in-Residence program, Katherine Hernández. Second row from left: Professor Grace Schulman, Thomas Bentvena, Hannah Lee, Jennifer Clement, Spring 2020 Harman Writer-in-Residence, Zalmy Okunov, Evan Gordon. Third row from left: Professor Gisele Regatao and Libby Smulowitz.
Three Baruch College students in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences took top honors in the spring 2020 Harman Fiction Contest Awards.
Harman Writer-in-Residence Jennifer Clement, an award-winning novelist and poet, Guggenheim Fellow, and president of PEN International, judged the competition that drew more than a dozen submissions from undergraduates.
“It was a true pleasure to judge the spring ’20 Writing Contest and read such promising work. I am also filled with hope and joy to be in a community that cares about telling and reading stories,” said Clement.
“As President of PEN International, and as a writer and teacher, I believe in the transformative power of literature and storytelling to promote peaceful debate, dialogue and empathy.”
Clement added, “As we move forward in our lives, this semester will always be remembered as a time of bewilderment, dread, sadness, and courage. And, over these weeks, I’ve often thought of John Berger’s words, ‘Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space that separates. And it does this by its continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.’”
The Awards Winners:
1st Place: Thomas Bentvena (‘20)
Major: Philosophy
Award: $500
2nd Place: Layla Huckabey (’21)
Major: Business Writing
Award: $300
3rd Place: Hannah Lee
Major: English
Award: $200
About The Sidney Harman Writer-In-Residence Program
Each semester, the Harman writing program offers a writing contest to showcase the creative talents of the Baruch community. Students have the opportunity for their work to be read by that semester’s Writer-in-Residence and be considered for a monetary prize. Contest subjects have varied from poetry to scriptwriting, graphic storytelling to narrative non-fiction, based on the Harman Writer’s area of expertise.
The Harman Residency Program, endowed in Baruch College’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, brings a distinguished writer to campus every semester. The Harman program has played host to poets, playwrights, journalists, non-fiction authors, and novelists who offer master classes in the workshop-style to select students, give campus-wide readings and serve as judges in student creative writing competitions.
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