Announcing 2022-2023 Creative Writing Prize Winners

2022-2023 winners of Fordham’s four Creative Writing Prizes: Chaise Jones, Kristine Saliasi, Grace Thomas, and Prettystar Lopez

By Yev Gelman

This year’s Creative Writing Prizes received an unprecedented amount of submissions from students across Fordham. As a department, we are so proud and overjoyed to have built a community of writers who aren’t afraid of putting themselves and their work out there. 

To write this article, I have taken the time to chat with each of the winners and ask them about their creative practice. To my delight, every single one of them reflected insightfully on their craft, their education, and their time at Fordham.  

Chaise Jones – Reid Family Prize

Chaise Jones (FCLC Honors ‘24), who called me from her study abroad program in London, is a double major in New Media and Digital Design and English with a Creative Writing concentration. She told me that living in London has been immensely useful to her creative practice –– New York, in her words “feels like a bit of an incubator” with how crowded and overwhelming it can be. “Sometimes you just don’t want to do anything, but are constantly having to do things,” she said of the city’s bustle, which she finds distracting from her work. 

Though she began as “more of a fiction girl,” taking classes with poetry professors who had a similar background to her made her “tap into [her] poetry side,” resulting in her Reid Family Prize-winning poetry collection “Clock Stars Passing,” which deals with generational bonds (and strifes) among the women in Chaise’s family. In her fiction, Chaise tends to be removed from reality, leaning into plot-heavy genre fiction with elements of fantasy and romance; poetry, by contrast, allows Chaise to share some of her more vulnerable experiences. “I feel like I can be more emotionally attached to myself in my poetry,” Chaise told me, musing that for her, “poetry is like a mirror, fiction is like a window.”

Clock Stars

for Classie

My memory is a weak creature

but there are duties to fulfill:

names that must stir on my tongue

and thrice in my mind.

Each recitation tethers them here,

saves them from an insatiable darkness.

I can go as far as great-grandmother on my own

and not much further back with help.

My family book has only ever been whispered.

Each of my ancestors is a clock star on the horizon,

helping me keep time, watching over the poor excuse of me.

Once I am the only anchor standing

along the veil of being and not,

who will be left on the other side?

Who will I be pulling back into the light?

My left hand will reach for my mother,

my right for my grandmother,

but what about the rest?

Will they blink out

in one final moment of nebulous bliss?

Will their tired souls shrink like white dwarfs?

I wish you’d let me be scared for another minute.

I wish you’d let me sit in this moment

where I am more than a memory, a story,

a supernova spending the last of its energy on an ancestral goodbye.

Another one of her interests is book-to-movie adaptations: after taking a screenwriting class at Fordham, Chaise wants to explore the world of adapting some of her favorite works for the screen. For Chaise, screenwriting “can be very formulaic, so it’s very challenging in that way. Like, there are rhythms, beats you have to hit.” Needless to say, she dreams of adapting her own work as well: “When I publish my book,” Chaise told me with confidence, “there has to be a clause in my contract that I will be an executive producer [of the adaptation.]” 

One of her favorite classes at Fordham, controversially, has been the Literary Theories class she took last semester. “A lot of English classes can lean away from diversifying the canon, so I really appreciated that [the professor] let us read newer, more modern things.” Diversity has been an important element of Chaise’s time at Fordham. Though she originally came to the school to study Political Science, Chaise was inspired by the amount of English and Creative Writing professors who had backgrounds similar to hers, and was drawn to the program largely due to the diversity of its faculty. 

“As a young writer, it’s like, Is everything I’m doing for nothing?” Chaise asked, describing a feeling familiar to many of our peers. “When I submitted my piece, I was at a low point in my writing … [I was] sort of second guessing myself.” Getting the Prize, for Chaise, meant that “someone had read [her] work and understood how [she] was feeling, and saw [her] work. Saw the value in it.”

“You have to keep writing,” she told me. “You can’t stop writing just because you have a moment of self-ridicule, or doubt. So, it’s been nice to not have to doubt my writing all the time.”

Kristine Saliasi –– Bernice Kilduff White & John J. White Prize

Kristine Saliasi (FCRH ‘23) is an English major with a double minor in Creative Writing and Philosophy. This year, she was awarded the Bernice Kilduff White & John J. White Prize for her short story “Tea in the Dead of Night.” 

“I loved writing short stories in high school,” Kristine said about her roots as a writer, adding that “they were all really bad.” Throughout her time in college, Kristine has continued to write numerous short stories, many of which have been inspired by her coursework at Fordham. “I don’t know why everything I write starts with an assignment,” she confessed. Creative Writing classes aren’t the only ones that inspire Kristine’s writing. Developing her academic and essay writing skills in courses across departments taught Kristine the importance of “getting to the point instead of talking around your point,” and being exposed to other female authors in her Literature Core classes brought her the confidence to continue writing. 

Though Kristine’s winning submission for the prize was a stand-alone story, you can find a fifteen-page outline of a novel in her Google Drive, along with an impressive amount of worldbuilding to accommodate the rich setting that her soon-to-be fantasy novel takes place in. “I like reading fantasy, so it comes out in the writing aspect as well,” Kristine told me when I asked about her interest in genre fiction. 

She hopes that after finishing her Masters of Science degree in education at Fordham, which she will begin as soon as she graduates this May, she is able to find time to complete the novel alongside a career as an English teacher. 

When she found out she was one of the prize winners, Kristine was able to feel a unique sense of validation of her work. “I think that impostor syndrome when you’re writing is such a nuisance…so sometimes getting outside validation is reassuring,” she told me, particularly when that validation comes from adult professionals rather than our peers. After receiving the prize, Kristine is excited to continue submitting her work, and looks forward to workshopping her longer fiction. “It all comes down to finishing a first draft,” she said, shrugging.

Grace Thomas –– Margaret Lamb/Writing to the Right Hand Margin Prize

Grace Thomas (FCLC ‘23), the winner of this year’s Margaret Lamb/Writing to the Right Hand Margin Prize, is also pursuing a Masters in Education after she graduates. After a lifetime of building bonds with English teachers, Grace is excited to begin teaching herself. “Obviously, you’re not gonna get a job in what you want to do,” she told me, “so I figured that the job that I do might as well be something I really love.”

When pressed to share the roots of her artistic inspiration, Grace described the source of her writing as “just ideas and words, and none of them make sense … Once I get an idea, I think about it instead of the actual stuff that will get me a college degree.” In the end, Grace’s ideas result in rich, idea-driven pieces of fiction pretty much exclusively about women –– “No hate to men,” she added hastily.

Her prize-winning short story “Pink Rain” centers around a sleepy Massachusetts town faced with a “whale-sized problem” –– a carcass of a beached whale that no one knows what to do with –– narrated by a journalist sent to cover the story. Inspired by great writers such as  Otessa Moshfegh (Grace’s favorite of her novels is the same as mine –– Eileen), Sylvia Plath, and James Baldwin, Grace’s fiction delves into the murky territories of the human psyche. “It’s a goal of mine to write novels,” Grace told me, adding that she will get on it “as soon as I get my act together.”

Grace grew up as a self-described “Y.A. girlie,” and holds those roots dear to her heart. She began writing as a member of her middle and high school’s short story writing competition team, where students were timed to write complete short stories in one sitting following a prompt. I’d never heard of this kind of extracurricular activity before my conversation with Grace. She likes to keep it under wraps. In her junior year of high school, Grace won the state short story championship, which is how her friends found out about her “diabolical double life” as a competitive writer. Even now, Grace continues to be shy about her work, rarely sending it to peers for feedback. “I send all my pieces to my dad,” she confessed when asked about her most helpful reader. “Shoutout, dad.”

As it was for Kristine, receiving the prize was a signal for Grace that her hard work was not lost in the myriad of stories and books written every day. “There are so many good writers out there,” she said wistfully. “[Sometimes it feels like] everything has been said. So what can I say?” 

Prettystar Lopez –– The Academy of American Poets Prize

Prettystar Lopez (FCLC ‘24) will graduate next year with a double major in Latin American Studies and English with a concentration in Creative Writing, as well a minor in music. At Fordham, she is a member of the Afro-Latin Music Ensemble, and has studied guitar, drums, and music production on top of her humanities course load. In her work, she seeks to bridge her three fields of study to create multimedia experiences for an audience. 

Prettystar began writing in high school as a spoken word poet, but since then, she has gravitated towards less oratory writing. “With my poetry [now], I feel like it’s a little more visual, like, on the page, and messing with form,” Prettystar explained, “So, I don’t really like performing anymore, but I want to get back into it.” Part of this desire to move back into the world of performance is Prettystar’s recent shift into songwriting. In her future work, she hopes to use her music production skills to create fully-produced recordings of her poetry, which often explores her identity as a Dominican-American woman.

Her influences range from some of her favorite contemporary Latinx poets (she highlighted Tato Laviera, whose work represents the “everyday life of Latinx people in America: the heartbreak, the adultery…”) to classics like Dante’s Divine Comedy and the work of Rainer Maria Rilke.

“[SOMEWHERE OFF THE CROSS BRONX EXPRESSWAY],” prize-winning poem written by Prettystar Lopez (FCLC ‘24)

Prettystar started working on “[SOMEWHERE OFF THE CROSS BRONX EXPRESSWAY]” –– the first of the two poems she submitted to the Academy of American Poets Prize –– in Sarah Gambito’s poetry class in the Fall of 2021, her first year at Fordham after transferring from Bard. The poem initially began at around half a page, and ended up four pages long, with each of those pages introducing new, inventive uses of the poetic form, and culminating in a powerful, screenplay-style conclusion. The use of the script format, Prettystar told me, was inspired by the Shakespeare class we took together with Dr. Mary Bly and Prof. Matthew Maguire, before which, Prettystar had had little exposure to playwriting. 

Before receiving the prize, Prettystar said “[she] was discouraged by the very little amount of writing that [she] was proud of in [her] college career.” The Academy of American Poets Prize, for her, was encouragement to keep going anyway. “I told my parents…and I feel happier that [I won the prize] with the poems about them,” she told me over the phone. “I feel happy that my first poem that won anything is about them, my muse, my inspiration. It’s not my prize, it’s my parents’ prize.”