Winning Poem Published by NASA-Chandra

Illustration Credit: NASA, S. Gezari (The Johns Hopkins University), and J. Guillochon (University of California, Santa Cruz)

A poem by Bethan Nutting, second-year English with Creative Writing student, has been published on NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory’s blog here.

As part of the second-year Creative Writing module, “Using Stories,” students are encouraged to explore the relationship between science and writing, and to use theories and concepts from science as starting-points for their writing. This year, the module included a guest lecture by Dr. Ian Whittaker from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and a reading by Rod Duncan, speculative fiction writer.  In one of the workshops, students were encouraged to write “found poetry” based on some of the remarkable findings of NASA’s X-Ray Observatory in Harvard, Chandra. Following this, we ran a competition in partnership with staff at NASA-Chandra to find the best student poem based on their groundbreaking discoveries.

The competition was judged by myself, Dr Jonathan Taylor, following previous poems which I have written for NASA-Chandra. You can read one of them here.

The winner of this competition is Bethan Nutting, with her beautiful poem “Stellar Homicide.” Her winning poem is now published on NASA-Chandra’s hugely popular website here. The original press release from NASA-Chandra, which formed the source material for the poem, can be read here. Congratulations to Bethan!