2021 Senior Novel Project Award Winners
The St. Stephen’s English department faculty is pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Senior Novel Project awards.
The Senior Novel Project is a rite of passage for members of the school’s 12th-grade class. Every spring, members of the graduating class create a term-long independent assignment that gives them the freedom to design their own course of study and the guidance to pursue interdisciplinary scholarship with faculty support.
Throughout the course of three project proposals that begin in students’ 11th-grade year, each student builds their own reading list of three novels and one alternative text (film, non-fiction, poetry, graphic novel, short story collection, etc.). They then spend the spring term researching, writing and presenting their projects. This final term of independent study allows students to create their own spring-term English course curriculum and helps prepare them for the end-of-term papers they will produce in college.
Congratulations to the following Spartans for their exceptional project work!
Cooper Price
The “Nothing's Going to Disappear Just Because You Can't See What's Going On” Award
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage
Jack Schaefer, Shane
Ernest Cline, Ready Player One
Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island (film)
Carling McQuinn
The “Where Life Ends and the Story Begins” Award
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation (film)
Kate Beveridge
The “What Came First, Art or Life?” Award
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Plato, Allegory of the Cave
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Decay of Lying (essay)
Veronica Cabeza de Vaca
The “Peeling the Layers off the Onion Dome” Award
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
Salma Mohamed
The “You’re So Vain I Bet You Think This Award Is About You” Award
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Grace Mugo
The “Art Is Empowerment” Award
Percival Everett, Erasure
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor
Beyonce Knowles-Carter, Black is King (film)
Vincent Moroz
The “You Say You Want a Revolution” Award
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Emma Cline, The Girls
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (album)
Jeanpaul Lugo Carrasco
The “The Math Meets Science Fiction Meets Art” Award
Dave Eggers, The Circle
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Brian Welsh, director, “The Entire History of You” (Black Mirror, series 1, episode 3)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Linda Liu
The “I Prayed in My Own Way” Award
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Toby Wolfson
The “Though This Is Madness, There Is Method in It” Award
Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater
Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Kate Golson
The “All Great Changes Are Preceded by Chaos” Award
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Hattie White
The “Lock Her Up...No, Set Her Free!” Award
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Cavan Bennigson
The Lewis Hamilton Award for Best Passion Turned Novel Project
“More Than A to B”: Freedom, Community, and Art in Literary Automobiles
Stephen King, From a Buick 8
Charles Dickinson, The Widows’ Adventures
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Justin Lin, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (film)
Fer Hurtado
The “There is No Greater Agony Than Bearing an Untold Story” Award
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice,
Laura Esquivel. Like Water for Chocolate
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones
Malika Chauhan
The Breaking the Bell Jar Award for Outstanding Portfolio
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
Mira Lee, Everything Here Is Beautiful
Gauri Shinde, Dear Zindagi (film)
Olivia Korensky
The “Mote of Dust Suspended in a Sunbeam” Award
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
Alexander McKechnie, The Fifth Science
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Duncan Trussell and Pendleton Ward, "The Midnight Gospel"
Mary Grace Wieland
The “Under the Pear Tree” Award
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage The Bones
Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Lee Daniels, Precious
Sofia Messer
The “Our Best Poetry Is History” Award
Magda Szabó, The Door
Sándor Márai, Embers
László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance
Gyula Illyés, “One Sentence on Tyranny”
Isabella Villarreal
The Yes, Queen! Award
Rosalind Miles, I, Elizabeth
Daisy Goodwin, Victoria
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Julie Taymor, Frida (film)
Billal Lyzzaik
The “Thirteen Going on Three Hundred” Award
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
Kahlil Gibran, The Broken Wings
J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Layla Metni
The “You May Say I’m a Dreamer, but I’m Not the Only One” Award
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See
Heather Morris, The Tattooist of Auschwitz
Roberto Benigni, Life Is Beautiful
James Stephens
The “Shaken, not Stirred” Award
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
John le Carre, A Perfect Spy
Kim Philby, My Silent War
Lara Tanner
The “I Saw the Sign” Award
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Tana French, Faithful Place
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Euros Lyn, director, “The Blind Banker” Sherlock (tv miniseries; season 1, episode 2)
Carson Murtuza-Lanier
The "History is Always Written Wrong, and So Always Needs to be Rewritten” Award
Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Anouk Martin-Gachot
The “All Who Wander Are Not Lost” Award
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Rachel Kushner, The Flame Throwers
Ridley Scott, dir. Thelma and Louise (film)
Jada January
The “History Has Its Eyes on Us” Award
James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk
Maurice Carlos Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow
Ava DuVernay, When They See Us (tv miniseries)
Richard Wright, Native Son
Abbie Prewitt
The “Stop Dreaming and Live Your Life” Award
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
Christopher Nolan, writer and director, Memento (film)
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Ian Chamoun
The Walter White Memorial Award for Most Inspired Chapter Conclusion
Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad (TV miniseries)
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
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Phone: (512) 327-1213