About the Boothe Prize
The Boothe Prize recognizes and rewards outstanding expository and argumentative writing by first-year students in the Writing and Rhetoric and Thinking Matters Programs. One first-place and one honorable mention prize are awarded to outstanding essays from each academic quarter at an annual award ceremony in May.
Each first place winner receives a certificate, a copy of The Collected Poems and Prose of Robert Frost and $350. Each honorable mention winner receives a certificate, a copy of The Collected Poems and Prose of Robert Frostand $200. The winning essays are published annually in Boothe Prize Essays: Excellence in Writing at Stanford and are available online through this website.
The Boothe Prizes have been made possible by the generosity of the late D. Power Boothe, Jr. and his wife Catie. Mr. Boothe was a graduate of the Stanford class of '31.
Boothe Prize essays for 2017-2018
The 2017-2018 year's Boothe Prize book is available as a PDF.
PWR Winners for 2017-18
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Alexis Lefft (Winner, Spring 2017): "'If Black Lives Matter, they deserve to be in paintings:' Kehinde Wiley's Lamentation as Ontological Resurrection." Instructor: Jamie O'Keeffe
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Jasmine Liu (Honorable Mention, Spring 2017): "From E Pluribus Unum to E Pluribus Plures: Examining Assimilationist and Nationalist Narratives in American History Textbooks." Instructor: John Peterson
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Sydney Westley (Winner, Fall 2017): "Conversing with Silence: Destabilizing Understandings of the Linguistic Reverberations of the Japanese Internment Camps." Instructor: Tesla Schaeffer
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Lucas Sato (Honorable Mention, Fall 2017): "Not with a Bang but a Computer: An Investigation in Promoting Safe AI Research Based on Lessons Learned from the History of Nuclear Technology Development." Instructor: Jennifer Johnson
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Roxy Bonafont (Winner, Winter 2018): "Push Factors: The Complicity of Traditional News Organizations in the Age of Ambient Media." Instructor: Chris Kamrath
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Rishabh Kapoor (Honorable Mention, Winter 2018): "'For My Old Kentucky Home, Far Away:' A Case for the Psycho-Sociological Dimension of Rural Brain Drain." Instructor: Lisa Swan
