Johnna Schmidt speaks at the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House’s annual Litfest.
“There will be more crying than usual,” said Alex Blinkoff, a junior English and history major, at this year’s Litfest. “There’s a lot of crying at our events.”
The 13th annual Litfest presented by the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House took place in the basement of St. Mary’s Hall on Thursday evening, drawing a close-knit community together to celebrate the culmination of the year.
The event consisted of readings from the Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize winners, a graduation ceremony for students finishing their second year of the Writers’ House program, and the reveal of the 2015 edition of Stylus, an undergraduate literary journal.
The writers’ house is a campus literary center and living-learning community for the study of creative writing. Each spring, the 50 or 60 students involved in the program organize Litfest as a recognition of student writers’ accomplishments.
This is what drew the community of writers to the St. Mary’s Hall basement at 8 p.m. The room quickly filled with chatter and laughter. Family and friends piled into the space to listen to the writers’ words.
Blinkoff and sophomore journalism major Rosie Brown served as presenters for the evening and introduced the seven Literary Prize winners.
“I literally can’t imagine my college experience without [the writers’ house],” Brown said. “Before, I kind of just wrote to write, which wasn’t bad, but now I see an actual future doing something I love.”
Anna Bella Sicilia, a sophomore history and philosophy major, took first place in the prose category for her story “On Fixing,” and junior education and English major Clayton Krollman was awarded first place in the poetry category for his poem “Nonskylessness (Ghazal).”
Finalists were selected by two judges, award-winning author Pamela Painter and poet April Naoko Heck, and then narrowed down to four categories of winners.
Each of the pieces presented perfectly emphasized a night dedicated to creativity and thoughtfulness — concepts reflected on on a daily basis in the writers’ house.
