About the Richard Scott Handley Memorial Award
The Richard Scott Handley Award began in 1994 and acknowledges the most distinguished creative writing by current PCC students published in Inscape during the academic year. Award winners receive a certificate and a cash prize at the annual Spring English Division Awards ceremony. Finalists are selected by the Inscape staff and Winners are selected by the Creative Writing faculty members. This year's winners were selected by Prof. Kaz's ENG 7 Inscape Magazine Editors. Thank you Prof. Kaz and Inscape staffers!
and also featuring
The 2022 Editor's Prizes for Alumni and Community Writers
KIRAN CAMPONE
Kiran Campone, 18, recently transferred from Pasadena City College and is a Junior at UC Santa Barbara, where she is majoring in English and preparing to apply to law school. Although Kiran has always enjoyed studying literature, she was hesitant to write creatively until she received encouragement from PCC's wonderful English faculty. Outside the classroom, Kiran enjoys playing piano, cuddling with her cats, and reading books of all genres. This summer, Kiran will be taking her love of English to Paris, where she will be studying comparative literature for four weeks through UC Davis' study abroad program.
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IT FEELS WRONG
It feels wrong to say, “I am Indian,”
though my mother, and her mother
were born of that land of mango trees,
of colors and spices, of saris and mindhi.
It feels wrong to say an Indian name,
and hear my American accent
choking its syllables and
scratching its sounds against my ears.
It feels wrong to sit silent and sober
as my cousins giggle with breathless smiles
and whisper a joke in perfect Hindi
that I cannot understand.
It feels wrong to hear my mother
tell me I've been saying my name wrong
my entire life.
It's pronounced kirun, not keeran.
But it feels wrong to say “I am not Indian”
when I still wish to sail to my mother's land
and see temples and golden altars,
sly monkeys with stolen puri in their hands,
the place where my mother married my father.
It feels wrong to think I am only one thing and not another.
I am an array of gleaming lights, a colorful fusion.
I am a tapestry of a thousand threads and tones.
I am the child of billions of years of evolution.
I am a body of Indian blood and American bones.
I am the daughter of my mother and her mother,
and I wouldn’t wish to be any other.
KENT SAKAMOTO
Kent is dual majoring in Natural Sciences and Humanities at Pasadena CIty College. He plans on attaining a Bachelor of science degree in Food Science and Technology, although he did give much consideration to UC Irvine’s admission into the literary journalism program. Kent would like to thank all his professors, but especially his English teachers at PCC. Thanks given to Man Hunyh for giving me a sound writing foundation, to Aisling Cormack for introducing me to literature and ideas that helped me grow as a writer, to Emily Fernandez helping me find my voice as poet, and to Kristin Kaz who helped me prepare for life as a writer outside of an academic setting. Kent enjoys vegetable gardening , running, and occasionally finds the inspiration to write. Currently he spends most of his time trying to find the answer to an age old college question: what is calculus? He has not figured it out yet.
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DEATH AFTER LIFE
Died for the first time at eighteen
Tuxedo bathroom floor blues
A fiend face down close enough to smell the perfume of porcelain tiles
Diet of red pills and magic seeds
Gallon of whiskey and half-baked dreams
As I push up, I see the brown bile
Spilt out of my mouth like overpoured cola
Can almost make out angel’s voices
Telling me what happens when a cup’s already full…
A trail of yellow post it notes leads the way home
“Keys are on the table”
I clumsily stumble over to another
“Flip this”
Keys ironically hidden at the bottom of a red cup
the drive home’s Solo
Is this limbo?
Can I go home?
Maybe I was twenty-three when I lost my bag of water and bone
Retreating to amphetamine dreams and baking soda schemes
Living with my head in the clouds (and teeth in the sink)
A wild heart racing recklessly around the track
It’s only competition, my lungs can’t compete
Each breath inhaled mechanically fails me
Like the water’s already overhead
This time I must be dead
Men in black cloches wait in the wings of my vision
Herding the peripheral darkness inward
Strangling the remaining beads of white and suffocating the light
Wrists and fingertips curl in
This must be the end
Maybe I was just a fetus
Before the world turned their heads
umbilical noosed neck
Trying to escape before life’s regrets
Before I knew this life’s price
The consequence is,
I’ll never know
My endings from my beginnings
Albert Sotelo
Albert is a Southern California native and a returning alumnus of Pasadena City College and University of California - Riverside, where he received his B.A. in anthropology. Albert would like to thank Professors Emily Fernandez, Akilah Brown, and Simona Supekar for helping to advise and inspire him in the fields of poetry, short story writing, and creative non-fiction. When he is not at work or school, Albert can almost always be found hiking the trails of the San Gabriel Mountains. He lives in Rosemead with his partner Bryan and pet cat Smokey.
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AYACUCHO
We rise at what we think is the asscrack of dawn, egg yolk
sun bursting over the craggle of mountains, pink speckled light bathing this mudbrick, rain-greened valley, where we yawning young Americans stretch high-calcium Honey Bunches of Oats limbs waking to the cock crowing ki-ki-ri- ki-ki. But the day has already begun, thousands of years earlier, grandparents sheathed in alpaca-woven ponchos tilling the wet red earth by hand, dragging oxen + plow over this motherland of potato and quinoa and amaranth, this humble land of maize terraces where babies are strapped in mantas to ladies hunched over yanking tubers from the soil of terraces stacked and curving at dangerous mountainous angles. Ancient clay granular soil borne witness of great civilizations cometh and fallen, empires, the Caral, Nazca, Chachapoya, Chimu, Moche, Inca, only shattered appetizers left of structural existence, great stone fortress cities, trash middens for arqueólogos to ruminate over, but also a pageantry of llama-to-loom textiles, irrigation canals transporting water city-to-farm better than any grading and drainage taught at UC Berkeley urban planning MA, and of course the sing-song lilt of Quechua, native mother tongue of Atahualpa that dances into one tindrum ear of us gringo students barely equipped for Broken Spanish and then out the other And what of the Spaniards, coño? Flamenco and toros and 10 commandments shipped faster than Amazon Prime via Juan Pablo I, II, III, IV and his lisping emissaries swallowing more ssss with thhhhh than Cindy Brady on a bender, La Misa Catolica ingrained into skulls for 300 years, cauldron of guilt and sin, destruction of the beautiful stone fortresses okayed by one elderly Italiano dressed in robes And yet this is the language we students speak to locals, promoters of English, pushers of an ethnography that captures the bleeding agony of death of the cochineal bug, ill-equipped not-quite teenagers unable to console when grandmothers speak of the scarred topography of this Andean valley, her wounds left open and unstitched, blood tears runneth in rivers from her melting glaciers, as we hear tales of horror, not even five years prior, of this very same earth playing hostess to unwanted guests, no shining path in the eyes of these night-walking creepy-crawlers dragging folk into the town square, gunshots, forced allegiance, electric power lines blown up, symbol of the hammer and sickle left burning in flames in the night-time mountainside, before interrogation from soldiers the next day. A people trapped between two warring predators. But we are just students. And young. We provide few solutions except for smiles and curated schedules that include stovetop-heated showers and three starchy meals per day and email friendships, and in the back of everyone’s mind, knowledge that we are temporary, and we will be replaced by the class that follows |
Yuly Mireles
Writer, Artist and PCC Student
Pero Quien Soy Yo?
Stuffed like a doll for the amusement of others to consume Am I my four sisters? My mother, My father Just a thing to be used I am told: You are a female. Una niña Una mujer But I want to be a boy… Un Hombre, like my father instead Work the field with him as we knead the soil in which we were bred But our borders keep us from crossing thresholds of generational solitude – I turn into a mute. |
SPECIAL EDITOR'S PRIZE FOR ALUMNI
Noah Kim
Noah Kim enjoys writing about phenomena that make him stop and think. He grew up in Southern California, attended Pasadena City College, and transferred to UC Berkeley. After graduating in Spring 2022, Noah will be a law student at USC Gould. Noah enjoys watching motor racing, fashion, and reading. His favorite reads are often Modernist poems and interdisciplinary essays about law and literature. While he aims to be a litigator, Noah hopes to continue to explore poetry and share the benefits of looking at something poetically.
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PURPLE
A Richness of the hue,
Exist in poison dew.
Sour before the ripe;
Not for a tasteful type.
A Haze.
Color weighs,
On Nightly Days.
Wealth droops across the sky,
Only by darkness neigh.
The Beauty we so love,
A Tyrant from above.
Flakes do embold.
Of yellow,
Of Gold.
Color of broken Pride;
Compliments much relied.
Without the Av’rice spew
Of endless riches ‘new;
Simple, impoverished hue.
Exist in poison dew.
Sour before the ripe;
Not for a tasteful type.
A Haze.
Color weighs,
On Nightly Days.
Wealth droops across the sky,
Only by darkness neigh.
The Beauty we so love,
A Tyrant from above.
Flakes do embold.
Of yellow,
Of Gold.
Color of broken Pride;
Compliments much relied.
Without the Av’rice spew
Of endless riches ‘new;
Simple, impoverished hue.