Potpourri Wins Outstanding Literary Arts Journal Award
A portion of the front cover for Potpourri 2018. This piece is called “Untitled” and was created by senior Sarah Johnson.
By Autumn Johnson
Concordia’s literary arts journal, Potpourri, recently won third place in the international English Honor Society Sigma Tau Delta’s Outstanding Literary Arts Journal Awards for the 2017-18 academic year. This is the first time Potpourri has won the award.
Potpourri is a publication organized and edited by Concordia’s Sigma Tau chapter. It is made up of creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry from students on campus. The cover is always student artwork and other black-and-white art pieces are included inside.
Every year, students submit their creative work, and members of Sigma Tau judge them anonymously using a simple scale. Editors of the 2018 edition, Morgan Consier and April Bayer, organized the layout before sending Potpourri to the Amazon CreateSpace to be published.
“We ended up kind of deciding on this journey that sort of reflected the opening of a curtain to a childhood to love and loss, to home, to being far away, to ultimately death and sin to forgiveness and humanity. We didn’t really plan that, the pieces just sort of reflected that in themselves, which was really neat,” Bayer said.
Potpourri 2018 received recognition on Sigma Tau Delta’s website, won a monetary award of $200, and will be on display at the 2019 Sigma Tau Delta International Convention in St. Louis, Missouri in March.
“It’s just such an honor to see everyone’s hard work getting recognition by the national Sigma Tau organization. The quality of the pieces that we received was outstanding and each author and artist’s work reflected a little piece of themselves,” Bayer said.
Concordia’s Sigma Tau adviser, Assistant Professor of English Dr. Gabriel Haley, says the purpose of Potpourri is to carry on a tradition at Concordia.
“Another thing is that it’s an exciting way to get student work out there for people to see. We actually sell copies of it on Amazon, and so it’s distributed widely that way,” Haley said.
