Poetry@Tech’s new Carolyn Ann Dimsdale Phillips Creative Writing Award is open to all currently enrolled Georgia Tech students. Students are encouraged to submit writing in multiple creative genres, including poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.

Four winners, each of whom will receive $1,000, will be announced in the Spring.

“People don’t always recognize the connection between the arts and engineering. I thought this might let some people realize their creativity may go farther than just the technical,” said Phillips, a 1975 Mechanical Engineering graduate who spent 35 years with Pratt & Whitney as a performance analysis engineer.

Victoria Chang, the Margart T. and Henry C. Bourne Chair in Poetry in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts announced the awards at the Kenneth and Amy Knoespel Family Reading on Nov. 5.

“I’m so excited about this gift because I have been hoping to launch a campuswide creative writing award that incudes multiple genres since I arrived at Georgia Tech,” she said. “Joe Phillips’s gift comes at the perfect time and enables us to expand our reach to the whole campus and more genres beyond poetry.”

The awards are named in memory of Phillips’ late wife, a teacher at St. Anthony’s Catholic School whose writing long inspired Phillips.

She wrote often, mostly for personal reflection and creative therapy, but rarely finished her works, Phillips said.

“I always bugged her to finish them because I wanted to know how they ended,” Phillips said.

Her works include a children’s fairy tale, an 8-chapter story about a mouse living in a WWI helmet stored in an attic, and historical fiction about a tarot reader facing church persecution.

“I think Ann’s writing is lovely,” Chang said. “What I enjoy about them is the whimsical quality which appears in her prose, especially,” Chang said.

She agrees with Phillips about the need for students from across Georgia Tech to explore creativity in writing.

“They, like everyone else, have rich inner lives and life experiences. They experience passion, love, loss, and human connection, and exploring those themes in writing can help us all better understand what it means to be human and live in a challenging time.”

Philips previously created a similar writing competition at Appalachian State University, where Carolyn was an English major, before bringing the concept to Georgia Tech to help expand technical students' creative horizons. 

The creative writing award joins the Thomas Lux Poetry Award in showcasing the talent of Georgia Tech student writers. That prize, offered annually since 2017, honors Georgia Tech student poets whose work demonstrates the dedication to craft and strong commitment to studying poetry, its techniques, and its traditions, as exemplified by Lux — the first Bourne Chair.

The reading at which the award was announced is the second named for Kenneth Knoespel, former LMC chair who retired in 2017, and his wife Amy, in honor of their continued support and a generous estate provision for Poetry@Tech.

For more information about the awards, including how to submit your work, visit the Poetry@Tech website.