Congratulations to Kanyinsola Anifowoshe ’24, winner of the Wrexham Prize and winner of the Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for her essay, “Touching the Earth, Feeling Freedom: Solitary Gardens’ Insurgent Feelings”! Each year, Yale College awards the Wrexham to that graduating senior who shall be judged to have written the best senior essay in the field of the humanities, and the American Studies department awards the Pearson for the best senior project in American Studies.
Based on her work with the public art project Solitary Gardens, Kanyinsola’s essay examines how, against the particularly ecological social death of solitary confinement, incarcerated solitary gardeners cultivate life-giving relations among humans, and between humans and more-than-human life. The essay argues that by tending to “insurgent feelings” of recognition, freedom, and responsibility—feelings which were never meant to survive within carceral regimes—solitary gardeners not only resist social death, they refuse the very terms of a social and civil world which can sustain a carceral state. Through their improvisations of social life, they illuminate personhood not as an anthropocentric or individualistic experience but rather as an irrevocably multi-species and interrelational endeavor.