Virginia Tech engineering student Ayah Ali won the 2024 Giovanni-Steger Poetry Prize on April 10.
Ali said she was simply searching for avenues to incorporate more creativity into her life when she stumbled across details for the 2024 event, according to a university news release.
Ali won first place and $1,500 for her poem, “The Ephemerality of Incense,” during a ceremony at the Moss Arts Center.
“My inspiration for the poem was really just my identity as an Arab person living in America and growing up here and sort of the disconnect that I experienced a lot of times with my culture and how much I would love to cultivate a better connection,” Ali said in the release.
The competition, open to undergraduate students of all majors, was founded in 2006 by renowned poet and University Distinguished Professor Emerita Nikki Giovanni and the late Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger.
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For Giovanni, watching the university’s appreciation for poetry spread across disciplines has been one of her favorite results of the competition.
“It is so good that we are now also noted for our poetry ... , because we at Virginia Tech have laid these eggs that are now hatching and we are seeing poetry crop up in lot of places that nobody expected it to,” Giovanni said in the release. “And I’m very proud to have been a part of that.”
Emily Paquette, a senior animal and poultry sciences major, won second place and $800 for her poem, “Swallow Song,” which she said is about missing her long-distance best friend.
Caroline Foltz, a senior literature and creative writing major, won third place and $500 for her poem, “Sailor Eyes,” which she wrote about someone who “feels a little out of place.”
The three winners received The Steger trophy, a piece of art crafted by students at Virginia Tech’s Kroehling Advanced Materials Foundry.
“We can never let words be silenced,” said Giovanni during the ceremony. “We can never let words be taken away from us. We can never let people, because they don’t like what we’re saying, shut us up. Words are the most important things that human beings have. And we must always remember, no matter what the situation, we must always remember to use them.”
The competition offers one of the largest monetary awards of a university-sponsored poetry prize in the Western Hemisphere, according to the release.
To read more about the poems and the competition, visit news.vt.edu.