Read the winners of the 2024 Wallace Prize on the YDN website or in our digital issue.

Maude Lechner is a senior in Berkeley College, majoring in English. When she is not reading or knitting, she’s usually writing stories about women who date (literal) monsters. Maude wrote “Camouflage” during her residency at Wildacres Retreat.

Adriana Golden is a senior from the Bay Area who now calls Davenport home. She studies English with a concentration in fiction, performs sketch comedy, and conducts psychiatric research at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Her fiction has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review. 

Cal Barton is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri. He is an English major in Morse College and fancies himself a master procrastinator. Cal enjoys almond croissants, art galleries, and making up phrases.

Aya Ochiai is a junior in Timothy Dwight from Skagit Valley, WA (i.e. not Seattle). She is majoring in mechanical engineering and environmental studies and until recently, avoided writing at all costs. She requests that you not report her to the police for the contents of her essay (pretty please).

John Nash is a senior in Benjamin Franklin College. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, he majors in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and works in the collections of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. 

Zoe Larkin is a writer and a Cognitive Science major (as a joke). She’s from California but she currently lives in the moment.

Lara Mohamed is a freshman in Benjamin Franklin college from Arlington, Virginia. In her free time, she enjoys spending hours at her desk writing essays and poetry. She plans on majoring in global affairs and history. She is a first-year liaison for the Yale Arab Association, Assistant Secretary General of Branding for Yale Model United Nations, and an upcoming peer liaison for the Afro-American cultural center for the next school year.