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Student Writers Go Public: 2022 Mandell Award Winners
June 23, 2022
2022 prize winners include (left to right): Ahmed A. Ahmed (C’25), Phillip Batov (W’23), Leo Biehl (C’25), Nicholas Diamond (W’25), and MaTaeya McFadden (C’25)
The Samuel P. and Ida S. Mandell Undergraduate Essay Contest recognizes students whose writing fosters informed, civil public discourse. Students who publish the Op-Eds or other writing they produce for their writing seminars are eligible for a prize. Other prizes are given to students who build on the research project they began in their seminars, as well as students who publish substantive research articles in one of Penn’s undergraduate journals.
Read More about the 2022 winners and their publications here.
Marks Family Writing Center Continues TIMBA Community Partnership
October 29, 2021
Kouassi with students. Pre-pandemic image: Courtesy of Palms Solutions.
Writing Fellows in the Marks Family Writing Center are currently working with Palms Solutions as communications and social media interns. Writing Fellows are also offering tutoring for K-12 students in West Philadelphia’s African- and Caribbean-immigrant communities, lending mentorship and support on school assignments.
Partnering with Jean Marie Kouassi’s (W’01, SP2’08) non-profit Palms Solutions, TIMBA is short for Technology and Inquiry into a Multicultural Bilingual Academic Setting. The after-school program was launched in 2012 in collaboration with Valerie Ross, founding director of The Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing, and Katie Beals, an adjunct professor at Drexel University. TIMBA is currently overseen by Stacy Kastner, associate director for the Marks Family Writing Center.
“I really applaud the work that the organization is doing,” said Anika Kalra, a junior biology major and Marks Family Writing Fellow who tutored with the program last spring. “I think they’re an amazing group of people and programs, and I’m really proud to have been a part of their mission.”
Read More at Penn TodayHoward and Nancy Marks Endow the Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing
May 20, 2020
A generous new gift from Howard S. Marks, W’67, and Nancy Marks has endowed and named the Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing at Penn Arts & Sciences. This is their second gift in support of writing education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Read More at Penn TodayStudent Writers Go Public: 2020 Mandell Award Winners
May 14, 2020
2020 prize winners include (left to right): Arnav Lal (C’23), Marilyn Pereboom (C’22), Ethan Kharrazi (C’23), Eytan Deener-Agus (C’20), and Brooke Krancer (C'20) among others.
The Samuel P. and Ida S. Mandell Undergraduate Essay Contest recognizes students whose writing fosters informed, civil public discourse. Students who publish the Op-Eds or other writing they produce for their writing seminars are eligible for a prize. Other prizes are given to students who build on the research project they began in their seminars, as well as students who publish substantive research articles in one of Penn’s undergraduate journals.
Read More about the 2020 winners and their publications here.
Penn Global Writing Seminar “Visits” Zimbabwe Online
May 1, 2020
Like other Penn students, those in Dr. Sara Byala’s “Becoming Zimbabwe” Global Writing Seminar had to deal with a disappointing change of plans, thanks to COVID-19. Instead of sharing a planned class trip to Zimbabwe at semester's end, students gathered together on Zoom. "The students had been periodically making Tik-Tok videos and sharing funny memes during the online portion of the semester," Byala notes, "helping us all to stay sane in these trying times." Read More and View Video
Penn Student Receives Distinction for Publishing in a Penn Undergraduate Journal
April 30, 2019The Critical Writing Program of the University of Pennsylvania is proud to announce this year’s winner of The Samuel P. and Ida S. Mandell Prize for Best Critical Writing Publication in a Penn Undergraduate Journal: Qingyang (Freya) Zhou, who published “Jewish Refugees in Shanghai: Interactions between the Chinese and the Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During World War II” in the Penn History Review 25:2 (2018): 50-88.
Zhou’s article tells the story of nearly 20,000 Central and Eastern European Jews who, escaping persecution from 1933 to 1950, fled to Shanghai, living in an area of the city smaller than one square mile, alongside 100,000 Chinese citizens. Read More
Penn Students Receive Distinction for Publishing Editorials
April 10, 2019The Critical Writing Program of the University of Pennsylvania is proud to announce this year’s winners of The Samuel P. and Ida S. Mandell Prize for Distinguished Critical Writing. The prizes are part of the program’s effort to foster informed, civil public discourse. Students in the Critical Writing seminars begin their discipline-based coursework with a deep dive into individual research projects that culminate with an editorial based on that research. Students must choose a “real world” publication for their editorial and are encouraged to submit their final draft to it. This year, the awards go to six published Penn-student authors. Read More
Penn Awarded 2018 CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence
March 18, 2018
The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) announced that The University of Pennsylvania was a recipient of the Conference on College Composition and Communication's Writing Program Certificate of Excellence on March 16 during its 2018 Annual Convention in Kansas City, Missouri.
To earn the award, writing programs must demonstrate best practices in writing instruction, exemplary professional development and treatment of faculty, creative response to student, instructor, institutional, and local needs, attention to diversity, and administrative staff with academic credentials and publications in the field of writing studies. Other criteria can be found online. Read More