The Graduate Awards Committee is pleased to announced the winners of the program's 2019-2020 Peer Essay Prizes.

First prize went to Meg Cole for her essay “The Trauma of Compulsory Heterosexuality: Pregnancy and Reproduction in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” Cole was lauded for her combination of convincing readings and historical contextualization, along with a splendid recounting of one of the most exciting authorial backstories! One of the committee members described Cole's essay as "a compelling recovery of the queer feminist elements in Margaret Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure, read through the analytical frame of seventeenth-century discourses (and practices) of maternity and reproduction."

Honorable Mention was awarded to Allison Kranek and María Carvajal Regidor for their co-written essay, “It’s Crowded in Here: ‘Present Others’ in Advanced Graduate Writers’ Sessions." The committee deemed Kranek and Regidor’s essay a richly contextualized demonstration of the need for graduate writing center consultants to attend to the powerful role played by “present others” in the cognitive processes of graduate writers. As one of the committee members put it, the essay "combined a clear and organized presentation with well-articulated stakes, proposing a useful new term to imagine the social networks and power relations that structure the scene of writing."