Farah Peterson Wins Pushcart Prize for Essay
Professor Farah Peterson was awarded the prestigious Pushcart Prize for her essay, “Alone with Kindred,” which first appeared in the Threepenny Review last year. Established in 1976, the Pushcart Prize honors the best essays, fiction, and poetry published each year by the nation's small presses.
“Alone with Kindred” grew out of the Law School’s 2023 Law and Literature Conference on the evolution of marriage in America. “As a legal historian,” Peterson recalls, “I had planned to trace American writers’ responses to evolving legal restrictions on interracial marriage.” In the end, it was writers’ silence on the issue that inspired Peterson’s essay. “There were so few literary depictions of interracial marriages, that I started to ask ‘why?’” The resulting essay weaves literary criticism together with Peterson’s personal experiences, including her childhood as an avid reader and her own interracial marriage.
The award is just the latest recognition of Peterson’s creative and interpretive work. In addition to scholarly work on such topics as Founding Era attitudes towards judicial power and debtor-creditor relations in Early America, Peterson is widely published in literary magazines. Her art criticism and personal essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Best American Magazine Writing, and Ploughshares.