Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Seventh Annual Writing Contest

In 2024-2025, SPACE held its seventh annual writing competition. Students from all disciplines across Dawson College were invited to submit writing that offered a personal interpretation of this year’s theme, Intelligence. The submissions were judged by Sarah Gilbert (Faculty, English), Hannah Rahimi (Faculty, English), and Jeff Gandell (Profile Coordinator of Literature).  The entries were evaluated according to originality and depth of thought, style, arts-sciences connections and relation to the theme. The winners received gift certificates from Argo Bookstore. The winners and honourable mentions have been published and highlighted in the SPACE web Website.

Below are the winners as well as the honourable mentions in the prose and poetry categories (click on the links to access the full texts).

Lauren Li: Red—Winner, Prose

"Red" is powerful, raw and emotional. This piece, full of devastating detail, speaks to the theme of intelligence by showing the destructive force of thoughtless comments, and how one learns from difficult experience.

Moving! Really great writing—love the sparse and simple style. Charming and heartbreaking.

A powerful piece that charts the complex interplay between beauty and pain. With time and the discovery of true friendship, the narrator’s burden of visibility transmutes into profound emotional intelligence. The writing is candid, nuanced, and deeply felt.

***

Julia Bisante: I Painted My Dreams—Winner, Poetry

Great use of imagery to paint an emotional landscape. Consistent nature imagery that presents a unified tone. Some excellent lines: “daggering stares…”, “The value of all that shoveled over.” Lovely rhythm: “They question their reflection, their importance / They question the rest of them, discordance…” I was moved!

This poem crackles with sonic energy and vivid imagery, a living testament to that which it celebrates: a vision of interconnectivity, of beauty beyond the binary.

***

Pranjwal Singh: Dear Clive, My Shiny Paperclip—Honourable Mention, Prose

Fun. Deftly written.

Love it! So fun. Bravo.

Deftly-written and finely-wrought, this story manages to address big questions of human existence with the lightest touch. A lovely ode to quiet intelligence and the unsung value of endurance.

***

Milo Belarbi-Tabourier: Knowing Without Knowing—Honourable Mention, Poetry

In a voice refreshingly forthright, this poem grapples with the simultaneous blessing and curse of human intelligence. Vivid, rhythmic verse conveys a state of urgent questioning, before locating liberation in the body itself, that vast and undeniable realm of wordless knowledge.