Excellence in First-Year Writing 2010/2011

to put the pieces back together over time, and we do best as writers always to embrace the challenge, knowing that in the end it will make us stronger, savvier writers.

We are honored to announce that the Sweetland first-year writing prize will be named in honor of Matt Kelley, who died suddenly and unexpectedly last winter. Matt had been teaching in the Sweetland Center for Writing for eight years and was a treasured member of the faculty. He was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the first-year writing prize last year and took the lead, with Chris Gerben, on organizing the competition and putting together the first volume of prize-winning essays. That first volume did not just publish excellent first-year writing—it showcased first-year writing, with all the celebration and respect that it deserves.. And that was just what Matt wanted it to do. The hours and hours that he spent working out the details of publication were non-negotiable, as far as we could tell—the idea of a shortcut with this prize inconceivable. Matt knew what he wanted this volume to be, not only for the prize-winning students but also for all the students and instructors who could be inspired by it,. With his energy, and his work ethic, Matt helped inspire all of us to envision what this prize could be. When the inaugural volume came out in September 2010, Matt wrote a blog post about it, and this post captures so much about who Matt was as a teacher, a writer, a colleague, and a person. Matt turns to Langston Hughes in this post, a writer he taught regularly, and he quotes the epigraph of The Big Sea, the first volume of Hughes’ autobiography: “Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pull.” Matt then takes us back with him to his first semester in college, to the moment where writing suddenly caught him, when he let down his nets. He writes, “I scarcely recall the specifics of the class, the readings or the assignments, but I can still feel the thrum of energies behind my eyes and in my hands as I wrote out and then pounded out my papers for that class, writing as though I really could belong to something.”

12 Excellence in First-Year Writing 2011