Cornell MFA poet wins first prize in Atlantic Monthly writing contest

Alleyne

By Franklin Crawford

Cornell graduate student Lauren Alleyne has won first place in the poetry category in The Atlantic Monthly's 2003 Student Writing Contest, and graduate student Pilar Gómez-Ibáñez has won an honorable mention. Both Alleyne and Gómez-Ibáñez are first year students in Cornell's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing.

The prestigious Atlantic Monthly contest is open to full-time graduate and undergraduate students at American universities. More than 500 students entered the poetry category.

Alleyne was awarded the $1,000 first-place prize for The X-Ray, a poem about ... well, getting an X-ray -- the result of an arm-wrestling accident, she said.

"I was defending my gender," explained Alleyne, who was born in Trinidad. She received a B.A. in English and communications from St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights and earned a master's degree in English at Iowa State University. That's where she challenged a fellow teaching assistant to an arm wrestling match.

"After he almost took my arm off, we kinda quit," said Alleyne, laughing.

But the pen is mightier than the sword. Fearing she might have fractured her wrist, Alleyne went for an X-ray and was fascinated by the image of her own hand. So she wrote a poem about it. Alleyne said she originally came to the United States to study radiologic science.

"I quit at the end of my sophomore year -- when we dissected a cat," she said of her brief medical career. "I wore three pair of Latex gloves, and I cried. I wasn't cut out for real medicine."

The switch to English has proved fruitful: Alleyne also recently won a three-year fellowship to Cave Canem, a Pittsbugh-based nonprofit organization for African-American poets founded in 1999. And she'll spend -- or bank -- her $1,000 check in her island home of Trinidad, where the exchange rate is six Trinidad dollars to one U.S. dollar, she said.

Gómez-Ibáñez received honorable mention for her poem She Sees Her Heart from the Night Greyhound. She earned her B.A. in English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992. A native of Madison, she has since lived and worked in Costa Rica and, later, was employed at a mental health center in Madison, prior to her return to school through the Cornell MFA program.

The highly selective Cornell program accepts just four poets and four fiction writers each year.

Winning the Atlantic's student competition does not ensure publication in the magazine, however. Both Alleyne and Gómez-Ibáñez are awaiting word on whether or not their award-winning works will appear in print.