To honor the University’s Class of 2015 Creative Writing Awards, the Library is publishing contestants’ poems or prose excerpts on Falvey’s blog. The Library also has created posters for the contestants’ poems or prose excerpts, which will be displayed throughout the library’s first floor.

The contest includes both poetry and prose (fiction or creative non-fiction). The Department of English will announce the Class of 2015 Creative Writing Awards winners at its annual awards ceremony.

Atlas Shrugged
by Roshun Sangani

It was not the weight
That bore down on Atlas
It was the wait
The repetition that he witnessed

Atlas is doomed to live
The most futile of existences
Not because his dreams are unfulfilled
But because they were possible

Even now the chains are cold
They chill Atlas to his bones
Only the dancing flames can save him
But he no longer has them

The fire which begot his strife
The fire which gave them life
The fire which is now mere coals
The fire which is the human soul

Roshun Sangani, a Class of 2015 Creative Writing Awards contestant, says “I wrote the poem because my teacher Professor Catherine Staples encouraged us to think about ideas in new perspectives. I had just been reading about Greek mythology and thought that maybe I could look at something in that in a different light. So I took the story of Atlas and framed it in a different way as he goes from a treacherous villain to potentially being humanity’s savior. This led to my inspiration for ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ and I just wrote with the intention of capturing this new idea.”