Scholarship award winner Kim Swendson ecstatic over winning prizes

Kim Swendson is a senior majoring in English with a focus in Creative Writing and minoring in Italian. She works with the ASAP program at CU as an Italian tutor, and breeds award-winning Bernese mountain dogs. During the summer, she works on a biodynamic farm in Santa Fe, cultivating heritage vegetables, working with the local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), and wrangling cattle. Kim is editor for the Honors Journal in creative nonfiction (last year) and poetry (2015-16). Currently, she is working on her first poetry manuscript, Baby, and when not up to her eyeballs in dog hair, vegetables, and homework, she enjoys hiking with her dogs, sitting in places she’s not supposed to, and laughing emphatically at bad puns.

“When I first saw the emails from the English Department sitting innocently in my inbox, my initial reaction was, ‘Oh great, I forgot to do something.’ When I saw that the subject of each email began with ‘Congratulations!’ my chest seized up. When each line continued in congratulations for my receipt of scholarships for my poetry submissions, I screamed.

“Paying to attend college for a degree that didn’t promise a secure future the way that an engineering degree would, was a decision that came served with three years of doubt and fear. I am one of my mother’s six children, born into poverty, subjected to the inane financial decisions of others. We were the quietly poor, presentable in our thrift store clothes and clean house, but some days I would welcome school as a distraction from worrying whether the car had enough gas to get us through the week. The anxiety mutated into doubt when education became the financial stressor, each year beginning with another layer of ‘How am I going to pay off my student loans?’

“Receiving these scholarships has changed my entire perception of the validity of the work I have done for this degree in English and why. They represent so much more than financial security for once in my academic career, being awarded for my writing. The pride that I feel for my work being chosen is more than I can comprehend, because it is the first indication that my words can influence people. I am endlessly grateful to the families of Alex McGuiggan and Curtis Michael Gimeno, and the Creative Writing Program at CU-Boulder for the encouragement and validation that these scholarships have granted me.”

2015-16 Scholarship Awards

• The Alex McGuiggan Scholarship
• The Curtis Michael Gimeno Memorial Scholarlship
• The Jovanovich Imaginative Writing Award