Nominate your best student writers for this year’s 2022 Carothers Distinguished Writers Award.
This is the 31st year that the Robert L. Carothers Distinguished Writers Award of $500 will be given out from the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities Foundation.
Any enrolled Metropolitan State University student who has excelled as a writer in any discipline is eligible. There are no restrictions regarding major, financial need, or genre/discipline of the work. It should be noted, though, that in past years, despite a diversity of judges whose specialties have ranged from technical to imaginative to business to critical writing, applicants whose written language shows an eloquence, sophistication, creativity, and overall mastery of metaphor, line by line and overall, tend to rate highest across the board.
Nominated students are asked to submit one double-spaced prose piece (fiction, essay, academic paper, etc.) and/or three to six poems with any line spacing (maximm 15 pages), using the following guidelines:
- Email to Carothers Award Selection Committee Chair: Suzanne.nielsen@metrostate.edu
- Subject line: Carothers Competition
- Include a maximum 15-page writing sample as an attachment to the email
- Include on this writing sample a name, current address, email and phone number
- Deadline: 11:59 pm, March 19
The selection committee will announce the winner in late April.
Minnesota State (formally MnSCU) will send a congratulatory letter to the student, followed by an award of $500.
Background: The Robert L. Carothers Distinguished Writers Award was created in 1991 to acknowledge Chancellor Carothers' outstanding contribution to the Minnesota State University System and to higher education in Minnesota by providing a way to highlight the work of student writers at the Minnesota state universities. This endowment provides one student at each of the state universities with a $500 award in the spring of each year.
Questions? Contact Suzanne Nielsen
Chair, Carothers Distinguished Writers Selection Committee
Associate Professor School of Communication, Writing, and the Arts
Metropolitan State University
Suzanne.nielsen@metrostate.edu
651.999.5950.