GSWS congratulates this year’s co-winners of the Tamara Horowitz Graduate Paper Prize: Caitlyn Mackenzie and Alyssa Quintanilla, both PhD students in Pitt’s English Department.
The authors on their essays:
- Mackenzie’s essay, “Toward Ecstatic Horizons: Developing a Queer Epistemology through Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography,” “elevates a queer epistemology invested in delay and disorientation. I explore the poetic topographies of Stacey Waite's Butch Geography, giving specific attention to how their poems defy teleological ends and instead enact an epistemological bundling marked by incoherence, estrangement, and potentiality.”
- Quintanilla’s essay, “The Part about the Bodies: Considering Bodies as Waste in Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Josh Begley’s Fatal Migrations,” “examines the overlapping political, cultural, and environmental concerns used against migrant bodies in the United States-Mexico borderlands. I use works from Roberto
Bolaño and digital artist Josh Begley to explore the depiction of bodies as waste and wasteful. Through these pieces, I examine how the rhetoric of national purity (both environmental and affective) leads to protected environments and demands for larger structures. I utilize an intersectional feminist methodology that aligns with environmental and material concerns to illuminate the violence used against certain bodies in the borderlands."