English major Yvette Ndlovu ’19 was recently honored with West Chester University of Pennsylvania’s Myong Cha Son Haiku Poetry Award. Along with a monetary prize, Ndlovu was invited to read her haiku at an award ceremony to take place at the university.
“The Haiku form, while it aesthetically looks very simple, can be challenging to execute,” Ndlovu said. “While the Haiku is a traditional form, you can really do lots of great things with it and take it to new directions.”
Ndlovu’s poem:
Soul Mate
roots snaking through dirt
nourished by a frothing spring
few will ever find
“The poem was inspired by this universal idea of a soul mate and how everyone supposedly has one person in this world that is destined for them,” she said. “I wanted to interrogate this idea of the soulmate or ‘the one’ and explore how complicated attaining the perfect form of something is. When you read the poem without the title it can really be about anything, from the environment to happiness.”
In addition to receiving the Myong Cha Son Haiku Poetry Award, Ndlovu has received the George Harmon Coxe Award for poetry. After graduation, she would like to pursue a master of fine arts in either poetry or fiction to ultimately become a writing professor.
The Myong Cha Son Haiku Award was created by Kyle R. Spencer, for his mother-in-law. Submissions are allowed for unpublished haikus by authors who are enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities.
More News from A&S
