UMN First-Year Writing Program Student Writing Awards

2026 FYW Student Writing Awards: Now Accepting Submissions!

2026 FYW Student Writing Award Submission Form

Deadline for submissions is Friday, January 8, 2027

Criteria for Award: 

  • The composition powerfully and effectively creates meaning and delivers a message.
  • The composition demonstrates rhetorical awareness in that it is adapted to meet the needs of the rhetorical situation. The composition is highly successful in engaging an audience. Both macro-level (message, structure, and components) and micro-level choices (word choice, sentence structure, style) enable the audience to think about the topic.
  • The composition skillfully develops content that draws on experience and/or research to inquire into and develop insight into the question or topic raised by the essay.
  • The composition is original work, produced in Spring 2026, Summer 2026 or Fall 2026 WRIT1301, WRIT 1301 H or WRIT1401.
  • The composition helps represent the range of topics, perspectives, voices, and forms of writing that are studied and produced in FYW course.

2025 FYW Student Writing Awards

Winning essays for the 2025 FYW Student Writing Awards. The annual FYW Student Writing Awards recognize and celebrate first-year writing student voices, creativity and writing development. This year’s 109 submissions demonstrated a range of student interests – from the effect of climate change on plant growth to funding for music programs in elementary schools, from horror films to family food traditions. Students created work in an array of forms – including comic strips, personal essays, research papers, and audio and video creations. 

In his short but powerful documentary film, Every Meal Tells A Story, Brian Lin reflects on how food traditions maintain culture and identity while also serving to build connections between cultures. By pairing beautiful narration with footage of meals from his family’s restaurant and home, Brian conveys the dual experience- sensory and emotional- of sharing food. Brian experiments with documentary film conventions including an opening montage and an interview with his college roommate about the role food plays in his culture and family; these additions support Brian’s conviction that food can function as a language that “crosses borders, cultures, and generations ... and has memories and builds connections.” 

In the essay “Thanks Dad,” Shueking Yang reflects on the deep bond he shares with his father, a man who grew up in 1970s Laos during a time of war and hardship and who endured an abusive childhood. Through vivid reflection, Yang describes a father who was both fair and firm, guiding his son with lessons shaped by sacrifice and love. The essay builds toward a quiet but powerful moment when his father reveals the truth behind those tough lessons. “Thanks Dad” is a moving coming-of-age story about family, sacrifice, and the enduring influence of a parent’s guidance. It reminds us that the dreams one generation could not pursue often become the foundation for the next.

In The (Social) Circus is Coming to Town: The Unsung Benefits of Community Engaged Circus Initiatives, Esther Anderson explores the unique power of social circus. In an accessible and densely researched work, Anderson shows how the creativity and versatility of the social circus movement make it an ideal vehicle for challenging systems of power. From supporting social and emotional learning and safer risk-taking for youth, to healing and empowering adults in marginalized communities, readers learn how “kinesthetic sociality” can work in spaces where traditional organizing and service methods may have failed. Anderson shows that super-human strength and human connection make social circus a powerful tool for social change. 

Shondea Thomas’s powerful video essay How the Lack of K12 Funding for Music Programs Affects Students Entering College and the Gig World brings together research, student voices, and musical performances to convey the importance of funding music education beginning in elementary school. She explains the dramatic loss of funding to music programs in public schools due to “testing pressures, staffing pressures, and the belief that music is less essential than core academic subjects.” Her project reveals how the lack of funding for music programs creates significant inequities in educational pathways and has long-lasting impacts on students’ careers and academic development. Shondea’s compelling musical video helps us understand that “Music education is not a luxury. It’s a pipeline.”

In Music & Lyrics By Ian Bell, an immersive sound composition, Ian tells a history of his own sense of hearing through the reverberant prism of musical theater. The composition likewise explores how listening, writing, and performing over the course of a young life have fundamentally shaped the student’s embodied sense of self in the world. Fittingly, Ian’s narrative interacts with a sonic collage of archival recordings he edited together, capturing years of musical performances from early childhood to increasingly sophisticated original productions. By blending personal artifacts with self-reflection and analytical commentary, the student creates a dialogic composition that blends music, memory, and storytelling with an ear toward the future.
 

Past Winners:

Winning submissions are available to read via the University Digital Conservancy. (See below)