First Place
Ida M. Johnson ’05
“Grains of Holy”
After graduating from Brown with a degree in comparative literature in 2005, Ida spent six years working as a teacher and teacher coach with Teach for America. In May of 2020 she will graduate with a PhD from the Department of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation is, "Girls, Boys, and Beasts: The Queerness of Child-Animal Figurations in Scandinavian Literature and Culture."

Second Place
Benjamin D. Clark ’05
“Looking at Bobby Fisher”
Ben Clark presently serves as an advisor to health-technology companies. Previously, Ben was President of IDx Technologies. Last year, IDx received the first-ever clearance from FDA for an AI system capable of fully automated disease detection – allowing specialty-level diagnostics to be deployed in frontline care settings. IDx-DR is broadly cited as a model of rigorously validated healthcare technology by FDA, AMA and ADA. Ben lives with his wife and three children in Cedar Rapids, IA.

Honorable Mentions
Claire E. Dunnington ’05
“Est: A Thesis for the Year 1819”
Claire Dunnington received her MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University on a Dean's Fellowship. There, she taught writing to undergraduates, worked at a literary agency, led the Nonfiction Dialogues program, and was Nonfiction Editor of the Columbia Journal. Her writing has been published in Slice Magazine, The Indiana Review, and Lumen Magazine, among others, and she recently completed a full-length work of nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a tutor and a harpist.

Vanja Torbica ’06
“Jezik (Tongue, Language)”