Engineering student's poem takes first place in Giovanni-Steger Poetry Prize
When Ayah Ali enrolled as a general engineering major at Virginia Tech this past fall, she didn’t anticipate her first year on campus would include winning a campuswide poetry competition.
Ali said she was simply searching for avenues to incorporate more creativity into her life when she stumbled across details for the 2024 Giovanni-Steger Poetry Prize and entered a poem.
Her decision paid off – literally. On April 10, 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.
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. 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 and for what we have done and created throughout the commonwealth, 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. “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.
“I'm really honored,” Paquette said. “I didn't expect to win at all. I was very surprised and really impressed by everyone else's work as well.”
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.”
“I like to take a lot of the things I see around me happening in my life and bring them into something that people can experience,” Foltz said. “This is my first time reading something I wrote out loud to an audience, so I'm really grateful for that.”
The top-three winners all 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.
To listen to this year’s finalists read their poems, watch the ceremony online.
