Escobar ’24 Wins Hartwick College’s Annual Anna Sonder Poetry Prize for the Third Time

The Hartwick College Department of Literature, Media and Writing is pleased to announce that, for the third year in a row, Sofia Escobar ’24 has won the 2023–24 Anna Sonder Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. It is only the second time in the prize’s forty-five-year history that a student has won it three years in a row. Gretchen Melancon Needham ‘95 took top honors in 1993, 1994 and 1995.

This year’s Anna Sonder Prize competition attracted 28 poems from seven Hartwick students. Judging this year’s competition were Associate Professor of English Bradley J. Fest and Assistant Professor of English Tessa Yang. Escobar took home the top prize for her poem “Sky Scorpion (an excerpt).” Honorable Mention was awarded to Amber Edens ’26 for her poem, “Vegas Is His Bed.”

Otto Sonder, late professor emeritus of sociology, endowed a prize in 1978 for the best poem written by a student at Hartwick College, to be awarded annually by the College under the auspices of the Academy of American Poets in New York City. Hartwick is a permanent member of AAP, which was founded in 1934 and is the largest organization in the country dedicated to advancing the art of poetry. To fulfill this mission, the Academy administers a wide variety of various programs, including the college prize program, which comprises Hartwick College’s Anna Sonder Prize. The prize honors the memory of Sonder’s mother, who died in 1978.