Top Poetry Prize Awarded to Converse Alumna

Converse College alumna Amanda Burgess earned the top award in the 2008 Hub City Creative Writing Contest. Her prize is a full scholarship to the week-long Wildacres Writing Workshop in Little Switzerland, North Carolina this summer.

Now in its tenth year, the contest is sponsored by the Hub City Writers Project and is open to Spartanburg County adults. Of Amanda’s poems, the judge wrote: “The diction in each of the poems is just right, and the carefully selected words provide a tautness that is remarkable.”

A Rome, Georgia native, Amanda graduated with magna cum laude honors from Converse in 2006 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing and a Dance minor. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University (Madison, New Jersey) while working as a Resident Counselor and Chaplain’s Assistant at Converse.

As a Converse undergraduate student, Amanda was a member of the Gamma Sigma Society, Dean’s List, Mortar Board, Alpha Lambda Delta, and Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. She also earned the Beatrice Smith and Thomas H. Maybank Endowed Scholarship, Henry Edmund Ravenel Scholarship, and Agnes Petty Pringle Award, a scholarship awarded on the basis of academic merit to a rising senior majoring in English.

Amanda also served as a Peer Consultant in Converse’s Writing Center; Editor-in-Chief and Staff Writer for student newspaper The Conversationalist; and Poetry Editor for Concept – A Literary Journal.