The Department awards prizes annually for academic achievement, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and drama, including:
- The Comfort Scholarship for Most Promising Student in Creative Writing
- The Topp-Grillot Scholarship for Strongest Students of Poetry
- The Jeff Rackham Award for Strongest Graduating Literature-Teaching Licensure Student
- The Gerald Gullickson Award for Top Rising Senior
- The Virginia Bryan Award for Best Senior Paper
- The Francis P. Hulme Drama Prize
An additional prize is reserved for first-year writing students:
The Olivia J. Gudger First-Year Writing Award
Other awards are offered for contributions to Headwaters:
- The Kenneth Noland Award in Art
- The Carl Sandburg Award in Poetry
- The Wilma Dykeman Award in Nonfiction
- The Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize
Students have also been awarded scholarships to fund travel to conferences and workshops. In the image above, Michael Thompson and Wes Byers stand in front of the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR, where they attended the 2019 AWP conference. Funding for their trip was made possible through a generous donation to the department.