Every year around Hopwood Awards season, students rush a small room in Angell Hall in a mad dash to enter their painstakingly edited and neatly foldered creative writing portfolios into the contest before the 12 p.m. deadline.

Every semester even more students endure the anxiety, frustration and bared emotions of fiction and poetry workshops across campus, scribbling criticism in margins and hoping that their peers won’t be as harsh.
Sometimes, these students actually go on to publish — Arthur Miller, Adam Herz (“American Pie”) and Jeff Marx (“Avenue Q”), for example. More often, they do not. But they do realize the opportunity to express themselves through a time-honored craft. To delve into depths of their creativity and, often times, their psyches that they would never otherwise explore.

Student prose and poetry can be rough. It can be off-putting. Nonsensical. Gratingly ungrammatical. Just way too much information about a random classmate in your 3 p.m. But it also holds an essence of humanity, an intimation of the reason why people continue to read the literary giants and then venture to pick up the pen themselves. Occasionally, a novice work will display real talent and the promise of great things to come.

For the annual literature issue of The Statement, I’ve compiled a selection of that last variety — prose and poetry from students whose propensity for writing could very well take them far beyond their undergraduate creative expression requirement. Here you’ll find the desperate longing of a young would-be mother for her miscarried child, a meditation on the fate of old maids, a poetic send-off to former Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr and much more. Enjoy.