Mary Esteve Emerging Scholar Essay Prize

Winner

Amanda Jennifer Su

The Dragon Lady and the Cold War
Pearl S. Buck’s Liberal Feminism in Imperial Woman

This essay brilliantly unearths a neglected episode in the history of postwar feminist thought and expression. Su compellingly argues that Pearl S. Buck’s orientalist romance about the Empress Dowager Cixi both anticipates a feminist critique of American gender ideology and reveals the complicity with liberal empire that would bedevil feminist thought in the decades to come. Su's essay is a subtle and lucid account of the far-reaching contradictions at the heart of a forgotten but richly complicated text.

Winner

Mitch Therieau

The Ambient Mode

Therieau's essay not only offers a tour-de-force reading of Alexandra Kleeman's Something New Under the Sun as the self-cli-fi of slow apocalypse, it also develops a capacious theory of the “ambient” as affect, style, and form. Reading ambience as the dissolving of climate “background” into daily “foreground,” this essay makes vital and original contributions to both ecocriticism and novel theory.

Honorable Mention

Michael Harrington

Wild West Fringe
The Cowboy's Queer Trace

Why did Lil Nas X go country? Harrington opens his bravura essay with this implicit question before diving into a vivid archive of "camp-cowboy imagery." Illuminating a rich cultural history from Owen Wister's The Virginian, to American Western cinema, and back to Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," Harrington brilliantly foregrounds the traces of queer and Black life that not only pervade, but establish, the image of the American cowboy.

Honorable Mention

Anna Moser

The Variant
Form as Deliberative Practice

What does it mean to make a choice? What kind of feminism is premised on the ideal feminist subject as she-who-choses? This innovative essay asks these questions through an analysis of formal refusals to choose. Drawing from a tradition of "the variant," from Emily Dickinson to Susan Howe, Moser argues that poetic form allows us to see the complexity of choosing: "the cancelled, withheld, displaced, or failed choice; the circumscribed choice; the choice that orients or disorients; the alternative that persists or elaborates; the pierced interval."

Honorable Mention

Christopher Spaide

Please, Please, Please

The Mourned Musician in Recent American Poetry

This beautiful, evocative essay limns the connection between elegy, lyric, and popular music by attending to poems about “mourned musicians.” Reading elegies by Terrence Hayes, Cathy Park Hong, and Tomy Pico, Spaide finds a reckoning with poetry’s own “insufficiency” as well as an overheard expression of collective grief–one that might attune us to the grievous history of racialized violence.

Post45 Essay Prize for Contingent Scholars

Winner

Marie Buck

For Malcolm and Embodied Collectivity in the Early Black Arts Movement

Through a consideration of the idiosyncratic 1967 anthology For Malcolm: Poems on the Life and Death of Malcolm X, this essay reevaluates the uses and possibilities of masculinity in 1960s Black cultural politics. Reading poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, LeRoi Jones, Etheridge Knight, and others, Buck powerfully argues that the rhetoric of masculinity in the Black Arts Movement moves beyond the idealization of patriarchy to become “a strategic metaphor” for the “communicability of revolutionary political affect.”

Honorable Mention

Emmy Waldman

Metamorphoses of the Spiral
Art Spiegelman's Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!

This daring essay moves deftly between close readings of Spiegelman’s signature spiral motifs and ambitious arguments about his uptake and transformations of modernist literature and art. Waldman’s precise and erudite examination of Spiegelman’s spirals as doodles, ornaments, icons, and metaphors offers a remarkably coherent and original account of “the interrelation between the artist’s modernist affiliations and his filial commitments.”