Dedman College News – Samyak Shertok, a Hughes Fellow in Creative Writing, has won the 2023 Witness Poetry Prize. Judge Joy Harjo, former Poet Laureate of the United States, writes: “The poem ‘Mother Tongue: A Haunting’ is a tight construction that embodies the haunting of language displacement amidst liminal familial memory. Mysterious essences of ghost presences ride the weave. Even language itself is a ghost because what is spoken can haunt you forever, even as it dissipates in consciousness.”
Samyak’s work will be celebrated in the next issue of Southern Humanities Review.