Awards and prizes
Creative Writing awards and prizes
The Sparks Prize
Awarded to a distinguished graduate of the Creative Writing Program as a post-graduation year of residency and writing time, funded by Nicholas Sparks and judged by an external writer. Based on the quality of writing and the likelihood that the submission will be published or will be developed into a publishable book.
2023 Winner: Lance Carroll, for KAIROS
Lance Carroll is a writer who, while born in southern Missouri, has migrated throughout the entirety of the Midwest. He graduated from Shimer College—"the worst school in the country"—where he earned a degree in liberal arts after a year of study in Oxford. At Notre Dame, he has served as the co-editor of fiction for Notre Dame Review and taught classes on nonfiction and speculative fiction. He is working on a hybrid memoir about sexuality and religious experience.
2023 Judge Tess Gunty's comments:
"With breathtaking prose, refined pacing, and an undeniable raison d’être, KAIROS sings. Here is a voice determined to excavate interpersonal and institutional hypocrisies with precision and tenderness, generosity and courage. There is no doubt that the author of this work has embarked on an auspicious literary career."
Tess Gunty's debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch, is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction, the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize, and the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. It was named one of twelve Essential Reads by The New Yorker, and a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, People, TIME, Oprah Daily, LitHub, The Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus. The novel has been optioned for film rights by Fremantle and producer Richard Brown. Tess holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. She studied English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Granta, LitHub, Joyland, Freeman’s, the Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere. Tess grew up in South Bend, Indiana, and now lives in Los Angeles.
The Mitchell Award
The Mitchell award is designed to honor one MFA second-year student for their special contributions to the Creative Writing Program, namely for distinguished achievement and contributions during residency. It recognizes the student who has been the most involved citizen in the program and one of its best writers.
2023 Winner: Kalie Pead
Kalie Pead is a queer writer from Salt Lake City, Utah. She is currently an MFA Candidate in Poetry at the University of Notre Dame, living in South Bend Indiana with her partner. While she grew up in Salt Lake she will always consider home somewhere between the red rocks of Utah and the wilds of Wyoming. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Whiskey Blot, From Whispers To Roars, Metaphor, and Peculiar.
The Samuel and Mary Anne Hazo Poetry Award
Recipient's work reflects Hazo's humanistic aesthetic/ideals and commitment to poetic craft. Selected by unanimous decision from current poetry faculty and based upon thesis, student's class performance, and contribution to the creative writing community and the MFA program.
2023 Winner: Zoe Darsee
Zoe Darsee was born about noon on a Tuesday. Later they founded TABLOID Press, a publishing practice rooted in the poetics & sounds of the local, with poet, friend and artist Nat Marcus in Berlin, Germany. This work continues. Some of the poet's texts have appeared in Annulet, KEITH LLC, Spectra Poetry, The Quarterless Review, in translation for EDIT Magazine, and in vocal collaboration with musicians Exael and DJ Paradise. Their chapbook, BELL LOGIC, is forthcoming from Spiral Editions. They are interested in structure(s), ideologies, and are working on a novel, for free.
Undergraduate awards and prizes
Outstanding Creative Writing Student
This award goes to the graduating senior who has excelled in creative writing.
2023 Winner: Andrew Lee
Billy Maich Academy of American Poets Prize
The Billy Maich Prize is awarded to the Notre Dame student, graduate or undergraduate, for excellence in poetry, recognizing for the best group of poems from among those submitted. Students may enter no more than five poems and are encouraged to limit their entries to 250 lines.
2023 Winner: Kristyn Garza
Richard T. Sullivan Award For Fiction Writing
The Richard T. Sullivan Award for Fiction is awarded to recognize the undergraduate student who submits the best fiction manuscript. Entries may be a short story or a chapter from a novel. Only one submission per student.
2023 Winner: Christine Hilario, for "Little Angel”
Ernest Sandeen Poetry Award
The Ernest Sandeen Poetry Award is awarded to recognize the undergraduate who submits the best group of poems. Students may enter no more than five poems and are encouraged to limit their entries to 250 lines.
2023 Winner: Taylor Erickson
Program awards and prizes
Sandeen Prize in Poetry
The Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry was sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame in conjunction with the University of Notre Dame Press. The prize was awarded to an author who has published at least one volume of poetry (authors who are graduates of the University of Notre Dame are not eligible.)
2022 Winner: Sheryl Luna
Magnificent Errors is a collection of poems that shows how mental health challenges can elicit beauty, resiliency, and hope.
In 2005, Sheryl Luna burst onto the poetry scene with Pity the Drowned Horses, which quickly became a classic of border and Southwest literature with its major point of reference in and around El Paso, Texas. Now with the poems in Magnificent Errors, Luna’s third collection and winner of the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Luna turns her gaze toward people living on the margins—whether it be cultural, socioeconomic, psychological, or personal—and celebrates their ability to recover and thrive. Luna reveals that individuals who suffer and experience injustice are often lovely and awe inspiring. Her poems reflect on immigrants in a detention camp, a meth addict, a homeless individual, and someone on food stamps. She explores the voices of people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or PTSD, poets, visual artists, and people living in a mental health community setting. The author’s own journey to recovery from childhood abuse and mental illness also illuminates how healing is possible.
The poems in Magnificent Errors are lyrical, narrative, and often highly personal, exploring what it means to be the “other” and how to cope with difference and illness. They venerate characters who overcome difficulties including ostracism and degradation. People who live outside of the mainstream in poverty are survivors, and showing their experience teaches us compassion and kindness. Ideas of art, culture, and recovery flow throughout the poems, exploring artistic creativity as a means of redemption. With language that is fresh and surprising, Sheryl Luna shares these remarkable poems that bring a reader into the experiences of marginalization and offer hope that grace and restoration do indeed follow.
Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction
The Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction was sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame in conjunction with the University of Notre Dame Press. The Prize was awarded to an author who has published at least one volume of short fiction (authors who are graduates of the University of Notre Dame are not eligible.)
2022 Winner: Maya Sonenberg
In these dense and startling stories, Maya Sonenberg telescopes seasons, decades, and generations in candid depictions of women’s family lives.
What happens when the urge to ditch your family outpaces the desire to love them? The stories in Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, attempt to answer this question, heading straight for the messiness of domestic relationships and the constraints society places on women as they navigate their obligations. Daughters desert their rheumy-eyed elders in dusty museums, steal a mother’s favorite teacup, or consider throwing their dead parents’ nostalgia-riddled belongings out the window. Mothers conclude that they love one child more than their others. Fathers puzzle over a wife’s inability to balance family and career or accuse a partner of blaming their child for her own misdeeds. Women mourn the children they decided not to have and fret over the legacy they’ll leave the children they do have. But sometimes the generations reconcile or siblings manage to rescue each other. Love tears these people apart, but it mends them too.
The emotions expressed in these stories are combustible, both fraught and nuanced, uncontrollable and common, but above all often ignored or hushed because we’re not supposed to be bored by our children or annoyed with our aged parents, even as we love them. The careful shapes of these stories adapted from fairy tales, verse, letters, or newspaper announcements, the surprise of their wordplay, and the blaze of their lyrical sentences allow them to dig into and contain all those messy emotions at the same time. In these works, constraint creates both understanding and fire.
Sandeen and Sullivan Prizes
The Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry and Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction were sponsored by the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English at the University of Notre Dame in conjunction with The University of Notre Dame Press. Both series are now complete and are not accepting new submissions. Beginning in 1995, the prizes were awarded to authors who had previously published at least one volume of short fiction or one volume of poetry and helped bridge a gap in publication support between an author’s debut and becoming an established author. To learn more about or purchase a copy of these award-winning books, please visit the Notre Dame Press website for the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry and the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction.
Ernest Sandeen was a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame from 1946 until his retirement in 1978. He was an award-winning teacher. His poems appeared in such journals as the Hudson Review, Poetry and the New Yorker. He published six volumes of poetry in his lifetime and served as emeritus professor of English at the University of Notre Dame until his death in 1997. His Collected Poems 1953 – 1994 was published in 2001.
Richard T. Sullivan graduated from Notre Dame in 1930 and joined the University’s faculty as a writing instructor in 1936. In addition to writing numerous book reviews for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, he published several short story collections and novels, including The World of Idella May, The Three Kings, Summer After Summer, The Dark Continent, and First Citizen. A popular undergraduate teacher, he is remembered for his description of writing as “hard work requiring patience and idiotic perseverance.” He died in 1981.