News and Events

Dean Nitecki congratulates winner Marcus Henderson

Drexel University Libraries hosted a Writing Challenge on Tuesday, May 22nd as a part of the University Archives’ Inventing the Page exhibition and the 2012 Week of Writing activities, sponsored by the Drexel Publishing Group. The challenge, held in the Libraries’ Bookmark Café, welcomed over thirty writers who were tasked with creating themed six-word stories.

The six-word story concept stems from a supposed challenge between Ernest Hemingway and fellow writers. Hemingway bet his skeptical writer friends that he could tell a story in under ten words and he did, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

For the Writing Challenge, Drexel writers participated in two rounds of creating six-word stories with different themes. In the first round, with the theme of Drexel, participants wrote about iconic Drexel items such as the Dragon, student experiences and academics. Philadelphia was the theme of the second round and participants entered a variety of stories about their experiences in the city. All entries were read and rated by three judges: Kate Lynch, Ari Melman and Kerri Sullivan.

After combining scores for the two rounds, biomedical engineering student Marcus Henderson, political science student Mirna Norales and psychology student Peyton Parrott were announced as the winners and collected their prizes.

Some of the winning stories included:

• I fight for my brother’s love.
  
• Brotherly love pulses through historical veins.
  
• One City: Love enlightens, education prevails.
  
• Applied online, got accepted, in debt.
  

The Inventing the Page: Student Literary Magazines at Drexel exhibition will run through Sunday, June 17th at W. W. Hagerty Library and is open to the public.