First Place
Michael H. Laws ’05
“The Death of Downtown”
A longtime copy chief at and contributor of articles (criticism, reviews, panegyrics, etc.) to such august publications as The Hill in Washington, DC, and the Village Voice in New York City, Laws currently works regular freelance gigs for Artforum and Bookforum, the Columbia Journalism Review, and People magazine—yeah, you heard that right—among other outlets. He lives with his wife and cat on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and will someday finish a novel. Maybe.

Second Place
Jennifer S. Cheng ’05
“Mother Tongue”
Jennifer S. Cheng is a poet-essayist. She is the author of MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS, selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018,” and HOUSE A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize. She received awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. www.jenniferscheng.com.

Honorable Mentions
Jamie D. Fleischman ’05
“Me and Danny Down by the Schoolyard”
Jamie Fleischman lives and works in Los Angeles, where she’s forged a multifaceted career in entertainment. As a development executive and writer, she’s helped shape and create scripted series, movies, reality shows, documentaries, and podcasts for NBCUniversal, Amazon Studios, A+E Networks, Audible, and more. A native New Yorker who swears she hasn’t become an L.A. cliché, Jamie can usually be found working on her comedy pilot or stuck in traffic on the 101.

Cecilia E. Kiely ’04
“Notes from the Field”
Cecilia Kiely is a semi-professional writer and editor and amateur parent. She has an MFA in prose from the University of Washington, where she was awarded several Stafford loans for her work. She’s never sure which is worse, listing a single publication or none at all, but her creative work has appeared in Sinister Wisdom. She also writes about boat-related topics for Passagemaker magazine. She lives in New Hampshire.

Sara K. Tedeschi ’04
“Wood”
Sara Tedeschi, MD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a rheumatologist and clinical investigator at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where she serves as Co-Director of the Giant Cell Arteritis Fast Track Clinic. Dr. Tedeschi receives support from the National Institutes of Health to study pseudogout, a painful arthritis caused by calcium crystals. She continues to write nonfiction -- sometimes creatively -- in the form of scientific manuscripts and grants.