ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University graduate student Lauren Alleyne won first place in the poetry category in The Atlantic Monthly's 2003 Student Writing Contest, and graduate student Pilar Gómez-Ibáñez 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 procedure. So she wrote a poem about it.

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 MFA program accepts just four poets and four fiction writers each year.