Using literature as a form of activism was the lesson for CA Upper School students who recently traveled to the University of Oklahoma to meet Neustadt Prize laureate and exiled Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugrešić. Commonly known as “America’s Nobel,” the prestigious Neustadt Prize is considered one of the most important American awards for literature.  

 

Colorado Academy students Kenneal Patterson and Chloe Ponzio traveled to the University of Oklahoma to take part in the award ceremonies and in the 2016 Neustadt Festival of International Literature & Culture.  The festival is produced by the staff of the World Literature Today, a 90-year old publication based at the University of Oklahoma that celebrates literature around the world.  Workshops included discussions around the refugee crisis in Syria, the tumult in Baghdad, and other international issues, all presented by current poets, authors, journalists, translators and publishers.

 

CA students Kenneal Patterson ‘18 and Chloe Ponzio ‘18 were among those selected for their writing, and who traveled to Oklahoma with Upper School teachers Tom Thorpe and Elissa Wolf-Tinsman.  Their assignment was to read selected works of Dubravka Ugrešić, then analyze the writing through a “scaffolding” exercise, and finally to brainstorm and write their own stories using Ugresic’s tools of metaphor, mood/tone, irony, and imagery about what it is like to live in America today.  Other winners included Ellie Bauer '17, Haley Dennis ’17, and Ann-Claire Lin ’18.

 

Says Ponzio, “For me, this was a one-of-kind experience,” to meet authors the likes of Ugrešić, and to attend workshops where she had the opportunity to improve her own writing.  Patterson says it was not just a literary event, but also a broader cultural experience that made it worth her while.

 

The program involves a partnership between CA and the Neustadt Prize whereby students study the works of that year’s laureate, receive a writing assignment based on that work, and then students are selected and awarded with participation in the festival and prize events.

 

The partnership is made possible by the generosity of CA parent Kathy Neustadt whose family long ago endowed the prize at the University of Oklahoma.  In the prize’s 45-year history 32 of its laureates, jurors, or finalists have gone on to win a Nobel Prize.

 

Ugrešić was born in the former Yugoslavia. She graduated from the University of Zagreb and earned degrees in degrees in comparative and Russian literature. As war broke out in the early 1990s in Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm antiwar stance, critically dissecting retrograde Croatian and Serbian nationalism and the criminality of war. She was accused of being unpatriotic and was targeted by government officials and the media. She eventually left Croatia, and now resides in the Netherlands.

 

Today, her novels and essays have been translated into more than 20 languages.  “Literature looks glorious from the outside, but it survives only because of literary activism,” Ugrešić told an audience of high school and college students at the University.  She described writers as “enchanters,” and encouraged students to have a super-sized appetite for reading.

 

“If you are a voracious reader, then everything holds inspiration. It doesn’t have to be James Joyce,” she says. “Your dryer instructions can be inspiring.”

 

And, while she describes the Internet as “a sword with two edges – good and bad,” she says it does provide writers a freedom that heretofore, did not exist. “Literature is a system that requires arbitration. The arbiters used to be people of good literary taste. Today the market has anointed itself as arbiter.  The market is aligned with majority readers, authors are now freer as a result.”

 

In his own remarks at the prize ceremonies, CA teacher Tom Thorpe described the school’s efforts to help expand the reach of the Neustadt Scholars program with an expansion of the writing competition to CA’s Horizons Program.  Ultimately, says Thorpe, the school’s goal is like that of Ugrešić’s: “She uses humility and her craft to empower her readers and audiences with the drive to think deeply, to engage in issues and humanity around us, and very simply make the world a better place.”