Corrington Writing Contests

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Annual Corrington Contests

Corrington Writing Contests

The English Department hosts two annual writing contests inspired by each year's John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence recipient.

This year's awards are inspired by the work of Crystal Wilkinson! 

On October 27th, 2025, Crystal Wilkinson will visit our campus to receive the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence. This academic year, the campus is reading her memoir, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, together as a community.

For this year's writing contests, students are asked to think about food, foodways, ancestral inheritance, family, place, home, storytelling, and memory.

What are foodways? According to Michigan State University, foodways are

“When food meets culture and history. . . . Foodways are all of the traditional activities, attitudes, beliefs and behaviors associated with the food in your daily life. Foodways include customs of food production, preservation, preparation, presentation, gathering, marketing (both buying and selling), uses of food products other than for eating and food folklore.”

 
For guidelines and submission details, click on each contest. 

2025-26 Contests

The Corrington Excellence in First-Year Writing Contest

The English Department invites essay submissions from first-year students inspired by the work of Crystal Wilkinson and engaging with ideas of about food, foodways, ancestral inheritance, family, place, home, storytelling, and/or memory.

Taking a note from Wilkinson, this essay asks you to think about food, family, place, and storytelling in a multitude of ways. Food and foodways are about more than what we eat. John Egerton has observed that "To learn what has gone on in the kitchen and the dining room—and what still goes on there—is to discover much about a society's physical health, its economic condition, its race relations, its class structure, and the status of its women.” 
 
Food and foodways can connect us with place, with people, and concepts like “home.” Food involves us in our communities, material culture, and history. How has food shaped your life and learning? What have you learned, discovered, and known about food and foodways? What would you like to learn? The following questions may be helpful as you think and write.    

  • When you think of food, what comes to mind? What dishes, locations, people, ingredients, preferences, or memories stand out to you? How has your experience of food changed throughout your life?   
  • Our relationship with food and cooking is often impacted by memory: our personal memories, memories of others, collective memory, conflicting memory. What memories of food, cooking, and eating are most important to you?   
  • Spend time researching an ingredient that is important to you. Or, research an ingredient that is unfamiliar to you. Where does the ingredient come from? What are its properties and histories? What names and uses has it had, and what makes it desirable (or not)? How has it shaped your ideas of cuisine and/or culture?  
  • Are there people in your family who make certain dishes that you really love? What recipes have been passed down to you? What recipes do you want to pass on? Or, is there a recipe you grew up with that perhaps your family never wrote down? Have you tried to recreate it? What do you remember about it?  
  • What memories do you hold involving a family member’s kitchen? Is there one kitchen you perhaps spent a lot of time in and if so, whose? Who are your kitchen ghosts? Where do you feel your ancestors most?  
  • What foods are ever-present for your celebrations? Is there a particular recipe your family makes each holiday or birthday? Is there one that often goes untouched, or leaves you wondering, why do we still serve that?  
  • While Wilkinson's book celebrates food and food cultures, not all culinary experiences are positive and celebratory. If you've had a significant (meaningful) negative experience with food or food cultures, describe those and argue why that experience was so impactful. What specific dishes or foods did you dislike? What were the circumstances (when, where, and so forth) in which that negative experience happened? Finally, what did that experience teach you or how did it alter your relationship with food? 

Essays should weave together personal experience, research and knowledge, and careful attention to language. Essays should be 1,000-1,500 words, not counting headers and citations. Any sources used should be cited.     


Deadline: December 5th, 2025

First Place: $250 & Publication in the conglomerate

Second Place: $100

Third Place: $50

 

To submit an entry click here. 

The Corrington Creative Writing Contest

The English Department invites creative writing submissions inspired by the work of Crystal Wilkinson and engaging with ideas of about food, foodways, ancestral inheritance, family, place, home, storytelling, and/or memory.  
 
In an interview with Image, Wilkinson explains the use of food in her writing:  


"Foodways are an important part of culture—just as important as colloquialisms and language and the deeper keeping of the old ways. I’m from the knobs region of Kentucky, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Food was part of the rituals that I grew up with, as it often is in a family. I write about food partly to keep those traditions. 


In my fiction, even if there’s dysfunction or unease among the characters, a good way for them to make a segue is to break bread with one another, to be involved with food in some way. The tensions, the happiness, the celebrations, are all around food.” 


This contest is open to all Centenary students. Students should submit only one piece, but all genres are welcome. Work submitted to this contest should be previously unpublished. 


Deadline: December 5th, 2025

  
First Place: $250, publication in pandora, and a performance at next year's Corrington Award ceremony

Second Place: $100

Third Place: $50

 

To submit an entry, click here.

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