Resources

Supporting Success in Creative Writing

One of the best ways Knox College prepares creative writing students for the writing life is by regularly bringing outstanding writers to campus for lectures, readings, class visits, and individual conferences with students. Knox has a long tradition—rarely found at institutions of Knox's size—of bringing scholars and writers of the first rank to the Knox Campus, made possible in part through the Caxton Club and recent creation of the John and Elaine Fellowes Fund. Recent scholars and writers who have visited Knox include:

• Alex Kuo '61, winner of the American Book Award.
• Quincy Troupe, winner of the American Book Award and Peabody Award.
• James Galvin, winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize
• Andre Dubus, National Book Award finalist.
• Jorie Graham, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry
• Wole Soyinka, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
• Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate
• Mary Lee Settle, winner of numerous accolades for her historically based fiction.
• William Gay, winner of the Peden Award and the Michener Memorial Prize.

Other scholars who have visited Knox include Antonio Damasio, Virginia Chase Sutton, Huston Baker, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Van Steenwyk, Susan Sontag, Marilynne Robinson, Tobias Wolf, Barry Lopez, Alvin Kernan, Maxine Kumin, Houston Baker, Alicia Ostriker, Natalie Zemon Davis, Jane Smiley, Tess Gallagher, Etheridge Knight, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Pinsky, Jane Gallop, Evan Boland, Alice Fulton, Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Aimee Bender, Carole Maso, Roger Weingarten, Robert Hass, and Valerie Martin.

Recognition of Outstanding Work
Knox's Program in Creative Writing annually recognizes exceptional student work. The following prizes are awarded, by outside judges, for outstanding student writing:

• Davenport Awards in Poetry, Playwriting, and Fiction, for outstanding original work
• The Procter Fenn Sherwin Prize in Fiction, given to a senior who submits the best original short story
• The Bev White Prize in Fiction, awarded to a beginning writer for an outstanding piece of creative writing
• The Howard Wilson Prizes in Literary Criticism, awarded to the students writing the best pieces of literary criticism
• The Elizabeth Haywood English Research Award, given to support a student project in England
• The Lorraine Smith Prize, awarded to the sophomore writing the best essay in an English course
• The Nina Marie Edwards Memorial Fund, provides assistance to junior and senior students carrying out independent or Honors projects
• The Scripps Prize, awarded to the graduating senior receiving the highest grades in English

Opportunities to Present Your Work
Knox offers a variety of opportunities for you to present your work:

• Catch, Knox's student-produced creative arts magazine, is one of the hallmarks of the creative writing program, named the nation's best undergraduate literary magazine three times, most recently in 2003. Edited entirely by students, it publishes student fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, art, music, and photography. Catch received both top honors and an International Pacemaker Award from the Associated Collegiate Press. Catch is also one of the longest running, continuously published college literary magazines in the country.
• Common Room is an electronic journal devoted to publishing critical essays by students.
• The Knox Student is the college's official, award-winning student newspaper. Produced weekly, TKS has been student-written, student-run, and student-read since 1878. It has a long tradition of being an independent voice for students, reporting on all developments at Knox that affect students, as well as covering the cultural, social and athletic life of the college.
• WVKC, Knox's campus radio station, is entirely student-staffed and was recently ranked eighth in popularity among students in the 2005 edition of the Princeton Review publication, The Best 361 Colleges.
• Writer's Forum and Off Knox, give writers an opportunity to read their work before a group of peers and professors either on campus or off-campus in an informal coffee-house atmosphere.
• Playwrights Workshop, is an opportunity for student-written scripts to be performed by students on campus.
• Caxton Club—scholarly and creative presentations by faculty, visiting scholars and artists

Library Resources
Seymour Library's special collections include such notable holdings as the Hughes Collection of Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation—first editions, letters and rare periodical publications of Hemingway, Cummings, Passos, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Pound and Stein. Large videotape and audiotape collections on American and international writers, Shakespeare's plays, and feature films are all available as well.

Works of Galesburg native Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters, a Knox alumnus, are also among the extensive holdings of Seymour Library—which houses 300,000 volumes and 700 periodicals. Beyond its collections, Seymour Library has also been ranked as high as third in the nation among college libraries, in a student survey of characteristics such as user-friendliness and ambiance.