# Pickens Prize

**Source**: https://afamstudies.yale.edu/academics/undergraduate-major/william-pickens-prize
**Parent**: https://afamstudies.yale.edu/

The Black Studies Department awards the William Pickens Prize annually for outstanding senior essays in the field of African and African American Studies.

To read a tribute to the life and activism of William Pickens, Sr [click here](https://afamstudies.yale.edu/news/pickens-prize-donor-and-sag-harbor-sans-advocate-william-pickens-iii-dies-85)

To read more about Yale Phi Beta Kappa graduate, William Pickens (‘04), a leading civil rights activist of the early 20th century [click here](https://afamstudies.yale.edu/academics/undergraduate-major/william-pickens-prize/educator-and-civic-leader-william-pickens)

## 2025 Pickens Prize Recipient

**Nasser Eid** was awarded the 2025 William Pickens Prize for their essay , “Black Sun”

**Zoe Colfax** was awarded the 2025 William Pickens Prize for their essay and accompanying film, “Blackdom: The Lost Kingdom”

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### Annual Pickens Prize Award Winners

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#### 2024

**Abbie Thomas**, a graduating senior, was awarded the 2024 Willam Pickens Prize for their essay  “Performing Power: Trinidad Carnival & The February Revolution”

#### 2023

**Aaron Magloire** “It was Lovely Up in the Bottom”: A Dramatic Exploration of Three Minor Characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula

#### 2022

**Nicole Jefferson** ”Race, Space, and Place: Infrastructural Vulnerability and Cultural Community Organizing in Broadmoor, New Orleans after Katrina”

#### 2021

**Anna Milliken** “Piercing a Black Feminist Framework:  Quilting in Gee’s Bend, Alabama”

Zyria Rodgers “Jazz”

#### 2020

**Jordan Bruner** “The Ostracizing of Young Black Athletes”

**Imani Butler** “Black Dreams Matter:  An Experiment in Educational Possibilities”

**Solomon Ghebreyesus** “The Whole Haitian Questions:  Paradoxes of African American Responses to the United States Occupation of Haiti, 1910-1934”

**Lydia Horan** “All I want to do is just survive:  Analyzing Predatory Lending in Boston as a Manifestation of Neoliberal Racial Capitalism”

**John McKissick** “Don’t Give Away Anything That You Can’t Get Back:  Private Archives and the People That Create Them”

**Tyler Miles** “We will be unstopable:  Black Queer Care in the City of Brotherly Love”

**Devin Moore** “Land Acquisition Displacement and Emergecy:  A History of Injustice in Michigan”

**Kai Nugent** “Talking Black on the Big State:  The Rhetorical Use of African American English by Black Speakers in America”

**Branson Rideaux** “Young, Colored Me, A Black Studies Thesis on Archival Recovery Through Embodied Performance”

**Ry Walker** “Undisciplined, How Broken Windows Policing was Insinuated into New York City Public Schools”

#### 2019

**Eleanor Pritchett** “ ‘Transcendentally Material’: Aaron Douglas and the Visuals of Publishing in the Harlem Renaissance”

#### 2018

**Youn Chang** “Seat of Empire: Multiracial Student Organizing at Yale Against War & Militarism”

#### 2017

**Lauren Chambers** “A Different Kind of Dark Energy: Placing Race and Gender in Physics”

#### 2015

**Jordan Konell** “A Special Solidarity?: Philadelphia’s Black-Jewish Relationship and the 1964 Columbia Avenue Riot”

#### 2014

**David Joseph-Gotenier** “From Segregation to Re-Segregation: A History of Racial Inequality in the YMCA”

#### 2013

**Ethan Mordecai Cargill** “The Black Arts Iconography of John Coltrane”

**Emily Wanger** “An ‘Awkward Silence’ - Examining Civil Rights Organizations’ Belated Opposition to Mass Incarceration in the United States”

#### 2012

**Jordan Rogers** “Put your House in Order and Plot a Sweet Life:  Home, Movement, Sexuality, and the Black Diasporic Musical Tradition in the South of France”

**Christopher Pagliarella** “The African Methodist Episcopal and Black Baptist Churches in Literacy Education:  Achievement, Loss and Hope”

#### 2011

**Rhiana Gunn-Wright** “Breaking the Brood Mare:  Representation, Welfare Policy and Teen Pregnancy in New Haven”

#### 2010

**Naomi Bland** “Plan B:  The Collision of the Birth Control Movement and the Uplift Movement Viewed Through Works of Angelina Weld Grimké”

**Rodney Reynolds** “I Know of No Better Way to Express the Struggle of Our People:  King, Hughes, and the Poetics of the Civil Rights Movement”

#### 2009

**Rena Karefa-Johnson** “The Stolen Girls Locked in the Leesburg Stockade: The Forgotten Price of Freedom”

#### 2008

**Andrew Dowe** “Time/Space/Self - Movement and Identity in black queer literary imaginations

Maura Fitzgerald Second Line Parades in New Orleans: Revelry and Resistance in the ‘Spaces Between’ ”

#### 2007

**Offiong Bassey** “Unlikely Candidates: The Authenticating Power of Evangelical Conversion and Call in the Live of Nineteenth-century Itinerant Ministers, Sojourner Truth and arena Lee”

**Hallfridur Birnir** “Walking Towards Brilliance: The Public Sculptures of David Hammons”

**Cynthia So** “The Causes and Consequences of Undocumented Haitian Immigration to the Dominican Republic”

#### 2006

**Kersten Charity Stevens** “The Blues-Hip Hop Dichotomy: Assessing Interstitiality in the Black Noise of the Past and Present”

**Bryant Hall** “The Power of Hypocrisy: The Politics of Double Morality in Cuba”

#### 2005

**Lia Bascomb** “Three Voices of Black Iconography: Nina Simone, Bob Marley, and Fela Anikulapo-Kuti”

#### 2004

**Julianna Bentes** “From Strong Roots: The Impact of World War II on the Civil Rights Movement through Citizenship, Empowerment, and Mobilization”

Erin Liotta “Bill T. Jones and Uncle Tom: Understanding Modern America Through the Politics of Dance”

#### 2003

**Nilofar Gardezi** “Kaleidoscopic in Memory Now”: Symbolism and Historicity in Robert Hayden’s ‘Angle of Ascent’ ”

**Cameron Leader-Picone** “Colored People’s Laughter: African American Literature, Jazz, Blues and the Problem of the Color Line”

**Sarah Nelson Wright** “Adopting Differences: Hybridity, Intersectionality and Transracial Adoption In Contemporary America”

#### 2002

**Joshua Jelly-Schapiro** “Are We All Creoles Now?”: Ethnicity and (Imagi-)Nation in a Heterogenous Caribbean Diaspora

**Melissa Barton** “ ‘An Off-Rhyme Occasion’: Race, Politics, and the Artistry of Gwendolyn Brooks’s War Sonnets”

**Alan Schoenfield** “The Politics of Position in the Teaching of Black Literature and the Future of Multicultural Education”

#### 2001

**Eyi Tuakli-Wosornu** “Black Skin/White Class: An Exploration of Black Students in New England Preparatory Schools”

**Alexandra L. Cox** “Reproduction, Apprehension, Production: The Visual Politics of the Crack Baby Scare”

#### 2000

**Ayanna M. Johnson** “Why Black Women Withdraw Early from Selective Colleges and Universities”

Brian J. Kreiter “Blackaccess.Com: Reevaluating African-American Participation in the Internet Economy”

#### 1999

**Rosa Walker** “Blackaccess.Com: Reevaluating African-American Participation in the Internet Economy”

#### 1998

**Regina Bain** “Black Theater: The Altar Line:  An Ideology of Theater Art for the Black Community”

Lorelei Williams “Wallflowers: Black Women in the Television Landscape”

#### 1997

**Nicholas Taylor Boggs** “Of Mimicry and (Little Man Little) Man:  Towards a queersighted theory of black childhood”