Current Honorees
The works below were written by first-year students in the Composition Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, selected for publication by Composition Program faculty serving on the Undercurrents editorial board. Please click About the Journal to learn more about Undercurrents, or click the links below to enjoy our 2025 selections.
Chloë Lucien’s Compelled by Darkness: Batman, Mental Instability, and the Blurred Line of Heroism
“By presenting heroism as inseparable from psychological dysfunction, Batman films challenge viewers to question the supposed boundary between mental illness and moral purpose.”
Samriddhi Khemka’s Unraveling Labor: Crafting Between Hobby and Work
“We must consider what’s at stake when we do or don’t count crafting as work, and how reevaluating this status might shift the way we relate making with value and with care.”
Nick King’s Saint Joan of Arc and the Modern Transgender Liberation Movement
“When Joan explains herself as having been commanded by God to wear men’s clothing, we can also see this sentiment in modern language, that using your preferred pronouns just feels inherently correct.”
Leslie Payne’s The Dystopian Landscape of Short-Form Content
“If I were to classify TikTok into one function, I would say that it is a platform that specializes in selling. It sells attention, it sells products, it sells identities.”
Ruby Pearlman’s No One Really Cares About AI-Generated Creative Work
“Real artists care about their art. Real writers care about their writing. There is immense thought and intention behind every creative work that simply cannot be replicated by generative AI.”
Victoria R. Reginaldo’s Baby Fever, Meet Reality Check
“The idea of raising a child while natural disasters become the norm, political systems feel increasingly broken, and basic safety feels uncertain can make the idea of parenthood feel more like a burden than a blessing.”
Mathilda Sanon’s To Speak Is to Survive: Language, Loss, and Holding On
“I think about my grandmother and how she never changed her voice for anyone. How she never apologized for her accent or tried to replace her words with someone else’s. Her presence reminds me that there is strength in staying rooted.“
Alfred Michael Wing III’s Dead Trees and Dollar Bills: Are We Prepared for an Automated Future?
“If automation is accelerating at a compounding rate, and the systems we live in aren’t built to absorb the shock, then we have to stop treating this like a future problem. It’s an immediate problem, just unevenly distributed.”
Perspectives on Writing: A Paired Essay Set
Ana Swanson’s Fuck The Academic Filter
“Why is it that so many of us have the same imagery in our heads when reading academic writing? Because writing in the academic filter removes the author’s individuality and makes them sound the same as any other author to the reader.”
Jameison Wirta’s Hamburgers: Great For Dinner, Bad For Writing
“Throw some personality into your writing! Talk to your audience, make references appropriate to their age group, make them laugh, throw them a curveball, for God’s sake please just do something! Don’t let all of your hard work fall on ears (or eyes) deafened by boredom.”