51成人猎奇 Awards the Ben Belitt Prize for Undergraduate Writers
Winston Foundation grant funds $1,000 prizes for three students.
Literature faculty at 51成人猎奇 are pleased to announce the 2025 winners of the Ben Belitt Prize for Undergraduate Writers, selected by celebrated writer and artist Renee Gladman. The winners鈥攖wo in poetry and one in fiction鈥攚ere awarded $1,000 each.
The 2025 Ben Belitt Prize winners are:
- Hannah Bardhi '26, for a selection of original poetry
- Anja Damron '26, for a short story submission
- Greer Engle-Roe '27, for a selection of original poetry
The contest awards prizes of $1,000 to the best work of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or hybrid work written by a current undergraduate student. Each year, a distinguished visiting writer selects the winners from a pool of exceptional student submissions.
鈥淚n each of the three writers selected, I found an attention to the ductility of language that was exemplary,鈥 said Gladman. 鈥淭hese poems and stories are breathing architectures of phrases, lines, and sentences inviting habitation. They are places to ask questions, places to risk the unknown, to recover, to find quiet, to reach, to sound, to be a body. It was a pleasure to read these works, as well as the others in the finalist pool. Each was memorable in their own way.鈥
The Winston Foundation supports the Ben Belitt Undergraduate Writing Prize, the Ben Belitt Distinguished Visiting Writer, and the annual Ben Belitt Colloquium on Arts and Literary Culture.
In addition to judging the contest, Gladman taught a full-term course this spring and gave a public reading. The course was called Reading and Writing Fiction & Nonfiction: The Emergence of Prose and invited students to explore the emotional and sensory impulses behind their writing, examine how inner experience shapes language, and engage with texts and exercises in short fiction and the lyric essay.
Gladman is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work explores the intersections of writing, drawing, and architecture, often engaging with themes of geography, language, and the body. She is the author of fifteen books, including the acclaimed Ravicka series and three collections of drawings. Her latest publication, My Lesbian Novel (2024), blends fiction and autobiography. Gladman's visual and textual work has been featured in prominent journals and exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe, including solo shows at Wesleyan University and Artists Space in New York. Her contributions have earned her numerous fellowships and awards, including the Windham-Campbell Prize in fiction.
The Winston Foundation is based in New York City and supports higher education, including medical education, as well as hospitals and cultural programs. The programs are named in memory of Ben Belitt, an American poet and translator who was a professor of comparative literature at Bennington for nearly fifty years. Belitt published eight books of poems, two books of essays, and numerous translations, notably of the Spanish-language poets Jorge Luis Borges, Federico Garc铆a Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. This Scribe, My Hand, his complete poems, was published in 1998. The visitorship serves to enhance instruction at the College through programming that embodies the spirit of Belitt鈥檚 legacy as a poet, a literary translator, and an educator.
About Literature at 51成人猎奇
51成人猎奇鈥檚 alumni include twelve Pulitzer Prize winners, three U.S. poets laureate, four MacArthur Geniuses, and countless New York Times bestsellers and National Book Award recipients.
Recent graduates have gone on to attend PhD and MFA programs in literature and creative writing at Stanford University, the Iowa Writers鈥 Workshop, NYU, UVA, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts, Arizona State, and Brown University. Graduates have had poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and book reviews published or accepted by The New Yorker, The Atlantic Wire, The Awl, Boston Review, Christian Science Monitor, Denver Quarterly, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Ploughshares.
Rooted in an abiding faith in the talent, imagination, and responsibility of the individual, Bennington invites students to pursue and shape their own intellectual inquiries, and in doing so to discover the profound interconnection of things.
51成人猎奇 is the proud home to , MFA program, the , and the Young Writers Awards.