2025 Morgan Award Winners Announced
The Writing Studio celebrates undergraduate writing and all that undergraduate writers are capable of, and we congratulate the winners of the 2025 Henrietta Hickman Morgan Memorial Award for First-Year Writers!
Winners of the 2025 Henrietta Hickman Morgan Memorial Award for First-Year Writers
1st Place
- Jiayu Huang “Red” (fiction)
2nd Place
- Justin Schwab “Statehood, Supplies, and the New South: Constructed Images in the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition’s Promotional Map”
3rd Place
- Shayda Oliaei “The Inexpressible In-Between” (non-fiction)
Honorable Mention
- David You “Personhood, Value, Animals, and Robots”
Thanks to all who entered their writing!
We want to offer a note of thanks, too, to all of the authors who entered their compositions for consideration in this year’s Morgan Award competition.
The 2025 Morgan Award competition received over 160 submissions–essays, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and more–all by Vanderbilt’s first-year undergraduates. That’s a lot of writing!
After giving careful consideration to this body of work, the committee felt inspired by and grateful for the chance to see the fruits of our first-year students’ academic and creative labors as writers and thinkers. From this auspicious beginning, we sincerely hope that each and every one of you will continue to dare to grow as writers throughout the rest of your time at Vanderbilt.
To learn more, visit our page on the annual Morgan Award competition. You might also scroll through our Gallery of Morgan Award Winners that now stretches from 2014, when organizing this longstanding annual competition first came under the Writing Studio’s purview, to this year.