Merrill Moore Prize: Winners Announced
2025 Merrill Moore Prize
Winners Announced
Three recent Department of English graduates have been awarded the 2025 Merrill Moore Prize. This distinction is voted on by Vanderbilt’s creative writing faculty and conferred by the English Department. The award is presented to a graduating senior who is selected based on “literary promise and the psychological or practical usefulness of the award” to the recipient. It consists of a cash prize and publication in the Commencement program.
Poetry: Amanda Maeglin
Fiction: Davis Works
Nonfiction: John Hague
This award honors Dr. Merrill Moore (1903-1957) who was 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 along with Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate who gathered off campus to share their poetry with each other. Dr. Moore took his M.D. from VUSM in 1928. The next year, he moved to Boston where he lived for the remainder of his life.
Throughout his medical career, Merrill Moore was an astonishingly prolific writer of sonnets. One estimate of his output was more than 50,000. He published a dozen books of verse – almost exclusively sonnets.
Please join us in congratulating our accomplished alumni!
