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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Anne Fadiman isn’t the only writing celebrity to take a star turn teaching at Yale. Eminent writers currently on the faculty include Pulitzer Prize winners, a founder of two magazines, a leading librettist, the author of The Hours, and a former U.S. poet laureate. The university has made writing instruction a priority. There are more than a dozen “creative writers” on the English faculty, several additional lecturers in writing, and numerous courses focused on prose, from freshman seminars to the intermediate Daily Themes to advanced workshops like Fadiman’s. Another 150 courses across the curriculum offer extra help with writing assignments. All this is paying off, at least by one metric: the results of the Atlantic Student Writing Contest in nonfiction. In the 13 years since the Atlantic relaunched this contest, Yale has captured 46 percent of all first prizes (6 of 13); 38 percent of all first, second, and third prizes (15 of 39); and 32 percent of the total nonfiction awards, including both prizes and honorable mentions (39 of 120). Most of these awards (34 of 39) went to work begun in writing seminars, according to Fred Strebeigh ’74, who has taught prose at Yale for a quarter-century. Fadiman calls Strebeigh “just the best nonfiction writing teacher I’ve ever encountered,” and a full 25 of the 39 awards were for work that originated in his courses. As Strebeigh wrote recently in the Yale Daily News, many award-winning writers also publish in and edit for Yale’s student publications. In the tally so far for the 2009 contest, Yale swept
the top prizes: Jialu Chen ’11, Isaac Arnsdorf ’11, and Alice Baumgartner ’10
took first, second, and third. Two other seniors, Emily Appelbaum and Laura
Gottesdiener, won honorable mentions. The Atlantic had not announced all results when this issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine went to press. But if the contest follows the previous
years’ format, Yale students have won half the 2009 awards. |
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©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
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