Wash-U Bibliophiles Win Book Collecting Essay Competition
The Washington University Libraries are delighted to announce the 2008 undergraduate and graduate winners of the annual Neureuther Student Book Collection Essay Competition. The prizes are $1,000 for each first-place winner and $500 for each second-place winner. This year's winners are:
Graduate Category
1st place: DJ Kaiser (Ph.D. candidate, Comparative Literature) for his essay "The Gift of Drama," about teaching himself the Catalan language in order to translate contemporary Catalan playwrights for an English-speaking audience. One of his translations-Guillem Clua's Skin in Flames-has been published and produced in the United States to critical acclaim.
2nd place: Matthew Fluharty (Ph.D. candidate, English) for "The Farm Books: On Keeping, and Giving Up, a Book Collection." Fluharty's essay chronicles the journey of a beloved book collection that had remained on his grandparent's farm for generations. When the family decided to sell the farm, Fluharty knew what he had to do. "If I could not save our farm," he writes, "then at least I would save its library."
Undergraduate Category
1st place: Shannon Petry (senior majoring in Political Science, French, and Italian) for her essay "Policy in Prose, and More: A Love Affair with Foreign Affairs." Petry's essay traces her fascination with books on European politics and diplomacy, beginning with an early discovery in the public library of Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and growing into a full-fledged passion during the two years she spent as a teenager in Milan, Italy.
2nd place: Michael Dango (freshman English major) for "Impossible, Infinite Illustrations," about a collection of books on death and mourning, and how none of them accurately described what he was feeling after the death of his mother. In his search for the right words, Dango writes, he discovered something useful about words themselves: "The importance of reading is not to define, but to sense; not to answer, but to suggest; not to finish, but to begin."
The winning essays are posted on the Libraries' website at www.library.wustl.edu/collections/winners.html.
This competition is made possible by an endowment from Carl Neureuther, a 1940 graduate of Washington University who sought to encourage WU students to read for pleasure throughout their lives.
Date of announcement: 4/17/2008