Honors & Awards

Each year English majors and minors have the opportunity to earn membership in two honor societies and win awards based on their research and writing abilities.

Honors

Creative & Critical Writing Awards

Journalism Awards & Scholarships

2026 Creative Writing Award Winners

Illinois Wesleyan University Department of English Prize for Short Fiction

Winner: Maggie Grugan for “Gull’s Crossing”

Honorable Mention: Lola Zuro for “Learning to Float”

Judge: Ron Rindo

About Grugan’s story, Rindo writes: “What I admired most about this lovely, winning story was how attentive it was to the technical work required to bring stories to life in the hearts and minds of readers: a consistent point-of-view; a likeable, well-developed main character with engaging interiority; a detailed sense of place; a strong conflict; elegant use of everyday language; and a resonant, wistful tone and resolution. I always tell my own students to include their passions in their work, no matter what they are, and a passion for bird-watching seems to inform this story, which is something else I enjoyed. Thematically, for me, it is a story about the pain of transitions: from the heat and joys of summer to the chill of fall; from the freedom of interchangeable summer days to the more regimented schedule of school attendance; and from loss to an unexpected, compensatory gain, a moment of joy, what Wordsworth might have called a spot of time. I also appreciated the ambiguity here, the array of things not said or explained. Really fine work.”

IWU Department of English Prize for Short Fiction judge Ron Rindo is the author of five books of fiction, most recently Life, and Death, and Giants. He is a recently retired professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin—Oshkosh.

Peter J. Theune Memorial Essay PrizeWinner: Lola Avila for “The Translator”

Honorable Mention: Victoria Bandy for an untitled essay

Judge: José Orduña

About Avila’s essay, Orduña writes, “‘‘The Translator’ is a moving and intimate portrait of a family coming together in a moment of crisis. As many children in our world are obliged to do, the narrator assumes an outsized responsibility—in this case, of translating, during a medical emergency. We, as readers, are brought into these moments of tumult and grace via the narrator’s unflinching eye."

Peter J. Theune Memorial Essay Prize judge José Orduña is the author of The Weight of Shadows: A Memoir of Immigration and Displacement and his essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Believer, The Nation, and The Normal School, as well as the anthology Don’t Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn’t Seen.

Arthur W. Hinners & Louise Hinners Sipfle Poetry Prize presented by the Academy of American Poets

Winner: Tyler Engel

Judge: Lauren Russell

Of Engel’s poems, Russell writes, “With a strong command of sound, syntax, and line, these poems ‘sting like waiting stings.’ Whether describing phantoms pulling pranks in a haunted landscape, an all-Christian dorm-room tampon demonstration, the fishy smell hanging over a miracle, or Fourth of July revelry and the creeping passage of time, content and form work together marvelously to reveal an element of surprise.”

Arthur W. Hinners & Louise Hinners Sipfle Poetry Prize judge Lauren Russell is the author of three books, including A Window that Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance, as well as Descent, which won the Anna Rabinowitz Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and What’s Hanging on the Hush. She is on the faculty at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Michael Theune - Robert Harrington Endowed Professor of English and Chair of English

Department - English

mtheune@iwu.edu

(309) 556-3168