The Columbia Review is excited to announce that we are offering one-time prizes to celebrate the first issue in our 100th Volume during the Fall 2018 semester. There will be three categories — Poetry, Prose, and Translation — as outlined below.
The Kenneth Koch Prizes in Prose and Poetry will be awarded to one prose and one poetry piece each by a current student who has demonstrated literary excellence in their work. The Review has named these prizes after Kenneth Koch to recognize his impact as both an influential writer and a dedicated professor of literature and creative writing within the Columbia community.
Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) wrote many collections of poetry, fiction, plays, and nonfiction. He was awarded numerous honors, including the Bollingen Prize and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, bestowed by the Library of Congress in 1996, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Koch was the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fulbright, Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill foundations. In 1996 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Kenneth Koch lived in New York City, and joined the faculty in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia in 1959, where he taught classes for over forty years.
The Columbia Review would like to recognize this legacy by encouraging two students to continue pursuing their craft. Each prize comes with a monetary award of $100.
We will also be awarding a third prize in Translation, given that our magazine has a history of publishing translated works, and we would like to further encourage those submissions from the Columbia student community. The prize comes with a monetary award of $50.
The deadline for consideration for the Fall 2018 issue and prizes will be November 13th at noon.
Eligibility for these prizes will be restricted to current undergraduate students of Columbia College, SEAS, Barnard College, and The School of General Studies. Please see our submission page for guidelines. Email inquiries can be directed at [email protected]
The Columbia Review is the oldest running college literary magazine in the nation, spotlighting writers from within the Columbia community and around the world side by side.