{"id":19799,"date":"2022-09-19T15:29:03","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T19:29:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/?p=19799"},"modified":"2022-09-19T15:29:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T19:29:03","slug":"tevis-wins-second-pushcart-prize-for-personal-essay-on-hazing-rituals-consequences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/tevis-wins-second-pushcart-prize-for-personal-essay-on-hazing-rituals-consequences\/","title":{"rendered":"Tevis wins second Pushcart Prize for personal essay on hazing rituals, consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joni Tevis, the Bennette E. Geer Professor of English<\/a> at Furman University, has won her second Pushcart Prize, this time for an essay published in The Georgia Review titled \u201cIf Your Dreams Don\u2019t Scare You,\u201d<\/a> a tour through history of hazing experiences, including her own.<\/p>\n

The Pushcart Prizes award the best poetry, short fiction and essays published in smaller literary journals and magazines in the United States. Tevis\u2019s essay will appear with other winners in The Pushcart Prize XLVII:<\/a> Best of the Small Presses 2023 edition, available Nov. 15, 2022.<\/p>\n

\u201cJoni Tevis writes insightfully about the social dynamics that lead to abusive hazing rituals and the consequences for victims\u2019 lives,\u201d said C.J. Bartunek, managing editor of The Georgia Review. \u201cIn the process, she takes readers into the hidden worlds of some fascinating subcultures, from elite college marching bands to the bizarre traditions of 19th-century secret societies to the 1950s space race, in which ambitious participants must determine how far they are willing to go to succeed. \u2018If Your Dreams Don\u2019t Scare You\u2019 is an unforgettable essay, which we were proud to publish.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Your Dreams Don\u2019t Scare You\u201d centers around Tevis\u2019s experience as a member of the marching band at Florida State University, where she earned her bachelor\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne thing I\u2019m really happy about is the community that writing and publishing this essay has allowed me to build,\u201d Tevis said. \u201cI wrote this from a place of sorrow, of losing the community that marching band had been for me. For me, being hazed in this way was a radically alone-making thing\u2014I didn\u2019t talk about it, not with the others who had been through it, and not with friends or family back home. When I finally started to write about it, after many years, I didn\u2019t realize the loneliness that I still carried with me, like a scar this experience caused me to have.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working with Bartunek, Tevis said, helped her \u201cshape the piece into something that wasn\u2019t just for me, but was for other people, other readers. After the piece\u2019s publication, I\u2019ve heard from other band members who\u2019ve reached out to connect with me about this material. I\u2019m so thankful for that. This is what I want my writing to do: to help us feel less alone, to help build communities.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis essay means a lot to me, not only because it was so hard to write, but because it allowed me the great gift of writing my way into a new community. I\u2019m so honored that it will be reprinted in the Pushcart Prize anthology, finding its way to new readers,\u201d Tevis said.<\/p>\n

Tevis\u2019s first Pushcart-winning essay, \u201cWhat the Body Knows,\u201d<\/a> was published in the 2015 edition of the compendium. Her first collection of essays, \u201cThe Wet Collection: A Field Guide to Iridescence and Memory,\u201d<\/a> was published in 2007.\u00a0 Her second, \u201cThe World Is On Fire,\u201d<\/a> was a Kirkus Best Book of 2015. Tevis\u2019s writing has also appeared in The Oxford American, Shenandoah, Conjunctions, AGNI, The Bellingham Review, North Dakota Quarterly and Barrelhouse. She earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston. She joined Furman\u2019s faculty in 2008.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pushcart Prizes award the best poetry, short fiction and essays published in smaller literary journals and magazines in the United States. Tevis’s essay, “If Your Dreams Don\u2019t Scare You,\u201d was published in The Georgia Review. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":389,"featured_media":19802,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,1],"tags":[1585,621,1584],"class_list":["post-19799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-english","category-uncategorized","tag-english","tag-faculty-awards","tag-pushcart-prize"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/389"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}