Name: Mariah Manoylov
Year: Third-year undergraduate
Major: Ecology & English
Submission: To Earth, From Mr. Brontosaurus - Narrative Poem & Spoken Word Video
Commentary: Mariah Manoylov’s imaginative piece stands out among our contest entries in that it serves as both science communication and science-based advocacy. Her empathic work challenges us to confront our complicity in climate change. The piece’s two personas — the regretful brontosaurus and the reflective narrator—give fresh poetic and emotional resonance to the science of climate change. For the brontosaurus, “every degree” of global temperature “feels weighty,” and the narrator longs for a world where “there were no holes in the sky” and “summer is summer and winter is winter.” Our contest judges were given the difficult task of comparing submissions from an array of formats and genres. In this regard, Mariah’s submission, which exists as both narrative poem and spoken word recording, is striking. Like Camille Watson’s short story, Mariah’s genre-defying work toys with the literary conventions of science communication, helping to spread her message, and the science behind it, to a broader public.
