 Undergraduate
 BA Creative
Writing
 BA English
BA Professional Writing
BS Technical Writing
Application
 Masters
PhD
Courses
|
Faculty Members Jane McCafferty
and Terrance Hayes present an award to
a Pittsburgh high school student.
|
Jim
Daniels, Director of the Creative Writing Program, established the
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards in 1999. The program builds
on Daniels’ commitment to writing about race (he edited Letters to
America: Contemporary American Poetry on Race. In 2001, the event
expanded to include a separate category for Carnegie Mellon students,
working on the premise that the voices of college students, and their
varying experiences, could and should interact with the young voices
from the Pittsburgh community The contest guidelines specifically
request personal narratives on race. We believe that if we learn each
other’s stories, the barriers begin to break down. We begin to see each
other as individual human beings,
struggling the way we all must, to
live good lives and treat each other decently. We are all parts of
different communities, and we reach out and cross over in strange,
often surprising ways. The King Writing Awards provides a common ground
for all these communities. As part of the University’s day-long
schedule of panel discussions and performing arts presentations, the
winners of this contest read in the University Center’s main lecture
hall to an audience of hundreds.
The submission deadline for this year’s
King Writing Awards is Monday, December 14, 2009. For more information
on this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Awards, please see the current poster.
Teachers and students may view some creative
writing exercises for brainstorming ideas. As always,
contestants are free to create works related to King’s legacy without
the use of these writing prompts.
In addition, each year, a book of award
winners’ work is published and distributed at the event. This archive
of those books is meant to keep the discussion going by making this
writing accessible to an even larger audience. Past winners and their
work are listed in the award booklets below, starting with the current
year. Please click on the program from the year you which to see to
download the booklet in PDF format.
|
