2025 Creativity Awards Showcase at NCTC
The Creativity Awards at NCTC for the 2024-25 academic year were a monumental success! Each year, the call goes out to our collective community for sixth graders all the way up to adult, non-professional writers to submit their best work for consideration in our annual review, Sonder. This year, we received over 200 pieces of writing and art! After our dedicated jurors, who are all faculty volunteers from our English, Speech & Foreign Language, and Art departments, experienced them all, fifty-five were chosen for publication.
This year, we invited the ridiculously talented and kind Alina Nguyễn (https://alinanguyen.com/home) to the college as our guest speaker extraordinaire. Alina creates work centered around connectivity, exploration, home, and how we are all in this thing we call life together. Her gift is communicated perfectly in an excerpt from her poem, “Poetry House,” where she says, “...A poet in Vietnamese is nhà thơ, thus, the body is a house / for the poem. I want to contain more than one…” She does so perfectly, embodying a humanistic poet in all the best ways possible.
We added a Saturday workshop element where Alina inspired us to create Ekphrastic poetry (writing inspired by art) alongside her. We reflected on art and imagery and our past, writing poetry and sharing it together. Everyone left inspired to write and enliven the world with our art!
Then the celebration occurred. We tried something a little different this year and held the ceremony on a Sunday afternoon in Denton, Texas, at the Patterson Appleton Arts Center. The Greater Denton Arts Council was an amazing host, and the space was perfect for our record crowd. Over 125 people attended the event, and it was such a positive, uplifting, and fun afternoon. We don’t often get to celebrate writers and artists of all ages, and it was amazing to see everyone have their time to shine. Alina gave a powerful reading and speech at the ceremony. Themes of family and identity resonated with everyone in attendance. Music provided by unmatchable DJ KD ‘the spinner’, food, and fellowship added to the festive mood.
The Creativity Awards committee would like to thank NCTC’s marketing department, all of our jurors, everyone at the college who has assisted with the business of the awards, and all chairs, deans, and administrators who gave their support throughout this process.
Mostly, we want to celebrate and honor everyone who submitted work for this year’s contest. Whether your work was chosen for publication or not, please know that it was nothing but a pleasure to experience. Never stop creating and sending your work out into the world. Now more than ever, we must connect with one another in the name of creativity, community, support, and love. We are so proud to be a part of your journey. And, get to creating for next year’s Creativity Awards. The submission window will open during the fall semester of 2025. We cannot wait to see what you send our way!
Copies of the book are available at nctc.edu/creativity-awards.