Page 10 - Contrast2015

Dear Reader,

You hold in your hands this year’s installment of
Contrast, a collection of prose, poetry, and art that is
McDaniel through and through. For years, Contrast has been
a labor of love on the part of the writers, artists, and editors
who bring it to you, as well as a magazine that consistently
offers glimpses into the various minds, worlds, and lives of
McDaniel students.

As my co-editor Jimmy and I were putting together this
year’s spring contest back in February, I was surprised to
learn that it’s fairly commonplace for college lit mags to solicit
submissions from students of other institutions. While such
magazines offer excellent opportunities for students to be
published, the idea of “intercollegiate” lit mags actually makes
me a little sad. A publication like Contrast, in being so
McDaniel-centered, offers two important gifts. Most
obviously, Contrast is an opportunity for talented McDaniel
writers and artists to have their work published. But perhaps
more importantly, it offers the McDaniel community at large
the chance to appreciate and learn from the diversity of these
creators’ experiences and perspectives. I think that’s pretty
special.

If you’ve poured through the pages of previous issues of
Contrast, you’ll probably noticed that we’ve switched up the
prize categories a bit this year. After the success of last year’s
travel writing section, we decided that we needed to keep the
nonfiction momentum going. We split the prose category into
separate fiction and nonfiction categories and have awarded
prizes in each of them. Admittedly (despite the fact that our
faculty advisor offers two excellent creative nonfiction writing