Merrill Moore creative writing awards announced
The Department of English and Creative Writing Program congratulate the recipients of the 2026 Merrill Moore Prizes for outstanding work in their respective genres. The awards go to graduating seniors based on “literary promise and the psychological or practical usefulness of the award.”
- Merrill Moore Prize for Fiction: Katerina Grace Krizner (Tallahassee, Florida)
- Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry: Colleen Alexandra Newman (Houston, Texas)
- Merrill Moore Prize for Nonfiction: Michael Ann Carroll (Vallejo, California)
The Merrill Moore Prize honors Dr. Merrill Moore (1903-1957), a psychiatrist at Vanderbilt as well as a poet. His wife endowed the prize after his death, and it has been given every year since 1961. Dr. Moore graduated from Vanderbilt, where he was a member of the Fugitives, a group of poets (including Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate) who gathered off campus to share their poetry. Dr. Moore received his MD from the Vanderbilt School of Medicine in 1928. Throughout his medical career, Merrill Moore was an astonishingly prolific writer of sonnets. One estimate of his output was in excess of 50,000. He published a dozen books of verse, almost exclusively sonnets.