KPU English department awards students for essays exposing societal inequities

Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s English department honoured students who have written about individuals and communities facing oppression and disadvantage.

The Intersectional Social Justice Essay Awards, which are in their fourth year, aim to celebrate student work that exposes and addresses inequity.

“Through this award, faculty and students gain opportunities to expose and unlearn their own biases, to explore the impacts of prejudice and discrimination, along with the systemic inequality flowing from them, both within cultures in general and the academy and classroom in particular,” KPU English instructor Gillian Bright says.

The department hosted a ceremony to celebrate the award winners on Sept. 18 at the Surrey campus library. The award recipients won $250 each in prize money, and both the winners and honourable mentions received $100 KPU Bookstore gift cards.

One of the recognized students was English major Swann Tsai, who placed first in the Second/Third Year Category for her essay, “The Power of Creativity: Systemic Harms and Indigenous Reclamation.”

Tsai’s essay serves as an online learning resource for non-English-major students to learn about settler colonialism. The piece begins with the systemic harms Indigenous Peoples face and the story of her half-Indigenous cousin, Devlin, who died in February 2024 from a drug overdose.

“While I didn’t know her very well, I know she had a very hard life and she was a very nice person,” Tsai says. “If she just had a better environment and she had better circumstances, she would have … been a lot happier. She would have had a much more fulfilling life.”

Her piece then goes into Indigenous reclamation, covering how Indigenous Peoples are more than their trauma and how they express their creativity, particularly through poetry and performing art.

Tsai was also an adjudicator for the first-year essay submissions.

In winning her award, she earned an internship from KPU English instructor Asma Sayed. Last year, Tsai also won an Intersectional Social Justice Essay Award and received an internship from English and policy studies instructor Jennifer Hardwick.

Tsai says she is grateful for the recognition and learning opportunities.

“I just hope to be able to learn a lot and be able to see where my ignorance lies,” Tsai says.

Julia Huang won in the First-Year Category for her essay, “Navigating Identity Through Acts of Disobedience.”

Huang’s essay was her final exam for an English literature class taught by instructor Jennifer Williams, who nominated her for the award. Based on the assigned readings from the course, she reflected on issues including social justice, equity, and freedom of speech through theorist Erich Fromm’s argument that disobedience is a necessary act of moral courage.

“[The award] is truly an encouragement. I always thought my English is not good,” says Huang, who plans to study mathematics at KPU. “English is my second language. I’m an immigrant. I believe in lifelong learning — that’s why I still come to university as a mature student.”

Psychology student Sana Aktary received an honourable mention in the First-Year Category for her essay, “How to Disempower Women.”

Aktary’s work was a compare-and-contrast essay between writer Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” text and the poem “Helen” by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

“I’m from Afghanistan,” Aktary says. “With the current state of Afghanistan and how much oppression there is for women that live there — the lack of education, the lack of resources, and the only way they can prosper is through marriage — I really felt the need to call out how that patriarchal structure truly disempowers women and takes away their independence and their freedom.”

She wrote the essay for an English class taught by Kirsten Alm, who nominated her for the award.

“I’ve always loved English. It’s my favourite subject, so to truly be recognized in a field that I love means the world to me.”

The ceremony also recognized students Elena Barahona and Jackson Choi, the two recipients of KPU’s N.P. Kennedy Memorial Award, which is dedicated to late English faculty member Neil Patrick Kennedy. The award is given to the top scorers of one of the university’s upper-year English courses in medieval or early-modern literature.

Alm says the 2025 Intersectional Social Justice Essay Awards marked another year of “awesome” submissions.

“It’s always really encouraging to see how different instructors are looking at these issues from multiple perspectives and how students are writing with such passion and fervour.”