This year’s Margaret Artley Woodruff award for creative writing recipients were Jason Feels, Michael Allen and Ashley VanDoorn.
Marilyn Kallet, director of the creative writing program, said the award is given to students who demonstrate outstanding writing ability.
“It’s a substantial award,” she said. “It’s the most money we give for creative writing.”
Students began to submit their work in April and eligible undergraduates were required to have at least a 2.5 grade point average and be currently enrolled in classes.
Kallet said writing samples were submitted along with the application. The samples were limited to 50 pages for short stories, plays and novels, and only 12 poems could be submitted.
She said the award is an honor given only to the most talented creative writers.
“It’s a big honor,” she said. “The judges had good taste.”
Ashley VanDoorn, a 2002 graduate with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, said, “I think the award is a very good thing.”
VanDoorn, who also won the award in 2000, said that the money awarded depends on the number of winners. This year’s winners each received $1,000. VanDoorn plans to use her award for a plane ticket and tuition to a workshop in California.
While Feels and Allen submitted works of fiction, VanDoorn turned in pieces of poetry from her honor’s thesis.
“My concept was of thresholds, the idea of the creative process and the thresholds that move through it,” VanDoorn said. “I used narrative poetry along with memory to break out of the usual ‘what happened’ narrative.”
This fall VanDoorn will go to the University of Oregon, and she hopes to eventually teach creative writing.
The award is given in honor of Margaret Artley Woodruff, who was born in 1921 in Savannah, Ga. While attending Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, she wrote “Heritage,” a poem that was given praise in the local Lynchburg, Va. newspaper, The Daily Advance.
Woodruff went on to become a writer and marry coach Robert Woodruff, who served as the University of Tennessee’s athletics director. She died in 1977 but now lives on through the creative writing award which bears her name.
